Word: celle
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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This time we'll bring a similar battalion, led by Washington bureau chief Michael Duffy and Nation editor Priscilla Painton, and our "mechanical conveniences" will go beyond teletype and television. We'll have cell phones, laptops, wireless e-mail and connectivity to our computer systems around the world. With CNN and AOL, we'll report both actively and interactively for print, television and the Internet. I say this not to brag, but so that some person sitting in this chair 52 years from now can find this page and be amused by how quaint we seem...
Biologists have spent much of the past century taking cells apart to figure out what makes them tick. Adam Arkin, 33, a physical chemist who divides his time between the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, wants to put the pieces back together again. His goal is to create a computer model of how the cell works so that someday he'll be able to design his own cells from scratch...
...daunting task. A single enzyme in a liver cell may be controlled by as many as 14 different regulatory processes. Multiply that by thousands of interconnected chemical reactions operating simultaneously in billions of cells, and you've got one incredibly complex system. But Arkin knows that computer-chip designers manage similar levels of complexity. "Good engineers in the 1960s could probably understand all the circuitry that people had built," Arkin says. "But when integrated circuits were developed, that became impossible." There were just too many pieces to put together...
Arkin is developing a similar program he calls bio/SPICE that he hopes will do for the cell what SPICE did for the chip. His first targets are simple bacteria. "They're still complicated enough that we get depressed," Arkin admits with a laugh. But he has already had some success grouping reactions together by the kinds of jobs they do. And, sure enough, some of them bear a remarkable resemblance to the gates and switches of an electronic circuit...
Giant, fully equipped trailers spilling with stars, makeup and directors' chairs and officious assistants barking incessantly into their cell phones once again invaded Harvard Square this muggy, drizzly week for the filming of another Harvard-based movie...