The Principle of Life [antikvár]

Foreword Every discipline has only once in its history such an exciting period which makes possible to provide the quantitative formulation of its basic relationships, establishing thereby its own exact, axiomatic theory. In mechanics, this has been done by Newton formulating the equations of motion; in electrodynamics by Maxwell with setting up the equations named after him. Some branches of science were not so lucky: for example, in chemistry a century went by with the argumentation of different tendencies resulting in an ever improving formalism quantitatively describing chemical processes, until fmally Berzelius succeeded in refining chemical stoichiometry practically to its present form producing thereby an exact theoretical basis for chemistry. In biology, an unbelievable amount of data and observations has been accumulated in the last centuries, especially in this century, and thus several previously mysterious processes of life have been clarified, such as heredity, photosynthesis, imtminity, etc. Biology seems to have achieved by now the level of development to transform from an experimental into a theoretical science capable of interpreting and forecasting events occurring in living systems quantitatively. In several special branches (e.g. Mendelian genetics or population biology) it has already come true. I feel happy to be the witness of 15 years from the three and a half decade birth process of one of the most beautiful, most general and perhaps most exact paradigm of theoretical biology, the chemoton theory. At a time when the whole scientific apparatus of the world tried to discover the mechanism of the storage, replication and reading of biological information. Professor Gánti, the author of this f