2 NOBELISTS TRY TO BRING BIOLOGY & PHYSICS TOGETHER. Selforganization of Matter and the Evolution of Biological Macromolecules

This item is currently on reserve; please contact dealer for more details.Gottingen: Max Planck Institut fur biophysickaische Chemie, 1971. First edition - preprint of paper submitted to Die Naturwissenshaften.

1971 RARE PREPRINT OF A PAPER STIMULATED DURING BREAKFAST BETWEEN THE AUTHOR, NOBELIST MANFRED EIGEN, AND NOBELIST FRANCIS CRICK (SIGNED BY BOTH), WITH THE GOAL OF BRINGING BIOLOGY AND PHYSICS TOGETHER.

15x21 cm red paper covers, inscribed and signed top of cover, "With best wishes! Manfred" and with signature of Francis Crick on title page. 145 pp followed by Acknowledgements: "Many of the single ideas expressed in this paper (truncated) certainly cannot be claimed to be novel. However, this paper is written for the physicists and the biologists and what may sometimes seem to be trivial for the one may not be so for the other. Another excuse for writing such a long paper is that I think the whole represents more than the sum of the single ideas. The thoughts on selection theory were stimulated during a breakfast discussion with Francis Crick." The list of references includes 6 by Crick in addition to those by Watson, Jacob, Monod, Darwin, Schroedinger, Haldane, Oparin, Einstein, Delbruck, Woese, Wittgenstein, and Waddington. The preprint is near-fine in a custom archival mylar cover.

MANFRED EIGEN 1927 – 2019) was a German biophysical chemist who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on measuring fast chemical reactions. Eigen's research helped solve major problems in physical chemistry and aided in the understanding of chemical processes that occur in living organisms. In later years, he explored the biochemical roots of life and evolution. He worked to install a multidisciplinary program at the Max Planck Institute to study the underpinnings of life at the molecular level. His work was hailed for creating a new scientific and technological discipline: evolutionary biotechnology. Beginning in 1953 Eigen worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physical Chemistry in Göttingen, becoming its director in 1964 and joining it with the Max Planck Institute for Spectroscopy to become the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. In 1964 he presented the results of his research at a meeting of the Faraday Society in London. His findings demonstrated for the first time that it was possible to determine the rates of chemical reactions that occurred during time intervals as brief as a nanosecond. In 1967, Eigen was awarded, along with Ronald George Wreyford Norrish and George Porter, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They were cited for their studies of extremely fast chemical reactions induced in response to very short pulses of energy. In addition, Eigen's name is linked with the theory of quasispecies, the error threshold, error catastrophe, Eigen's paradox, and the chemical hypercycle, the cyclic linkage of reaction cycles as an explanation for the self-organization of prebiotic systems. The preprint offered here includes an early formulation of The Hypercycle. A Principle of Natural Self-Organisation which he expanded with Peter Schuster in the late 1970s. The paper concludes with consideration of the principles of selection and evolution, and the question: Can the phenomenon of life be explained by our present concepts of physics?
FRANCIS H. C. CRICK (1916 – 2004) attended University College London and took his Ph.D. from Cambridge. Although a physicist, he turned to biochemistry and molecular biology to research genetic data, specifically to determine the structure of DNA. In 1953, he co-authored with James Watson the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. His later research centered on theoretical neurobiology and attempts to advance the scientific study of human consciousness. (Inventory #: 1271)