Sandwalk: The Maud Menten Center

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

The Maud Menten Center

Several people have commented on Facebook about an interview with Matthew Cobb [Reflections on the Double Helix's Platinum Anniversary]. Cobb has written several books that you all should have read by now. You may also be familiar with his name from Jerry Coyne's website since he is mentioned there quite a lot.

Cobb is currently writing a biography of Francis Crick and it's the reference to Crick that's attracting attention.

Watson and Crick had something that very few of us have, which is a very relaxed relationship that allowed arguing and talking and debating and being prepared to have crazy ideas that the other person could shoot down.

This is something that Crick continued to do with Nobelist Sydney Brenner, PhD, for over 20 years. Every morning, they would just yak at each other for hours on end and talk rubbish. And most of it was rubbish! But every now and again, there would be something really insightful that they had seen in an article that they could develop further.

And that’s not exactly possible in today’s world, which focuses on how many Nature, Science, or Cell articles are on a CV. So, they were living in a very different world that was much more relaxed. But I think if we could reinject a bit of that back into science—more freedom and time to explore—I think everybody would benefit.

I think we need an institute that's similar to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton except that it would be focused on biochemistry and molecular biology, including genomics and molecular evolution. It would be a place for theorists and it would encourage the kind of interactions that Cobb is talking about. I think we should create that institute in Toronto and call it the Maud Menten Center after Maud L. Menten who got her undergraduate medical degree at the University of Toronto in 1907 and later on (1911) was awarded the advanced medical degree equivalent to a Ph.D.¹ Most of you will know her from her work on the theory of enzyme kinetics with Leonor Michaelis. Michaelis-Menten kinetics is one of the most important contributions to biochemistry in the 20th century.

The Maud Menten Center should have a permanent staff of several smart scientists and facilities for a large number of visiting scientists who could spend their sabbaticals at the institute. There are major corporations in Toronto that could be encouraged to contribute to supporting research in this field but a lot of the support might come from various levels of government. The Canadian model is the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

1. There's a lot of confusion about the various degrees Menten got at the University of Toronto but with the help of a few people in the alumni office we were able to sort it out [The mystery of Maud Menten].

No comments :

Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)

Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Peter Atkins

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake. Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory. Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change. Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance. Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change. Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat. Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

I once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000

It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick

There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod

The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.

Richard Lewontin

More Recent Comments

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

The Maud Menten Center

No comments :