At the dawn of a new revolution in life sciences

Abstract

In a recently published article Sydney Brenner argued that the most relevant scientific revolution in biology at his time was the breakthrough of the role of “information” in biology. The fundamental concept that integrates this new biological “information” with matter and energy is the universal Turing machine and von Neumann’s self-reproducing machines. In this article we demonstrate that in contrast to Turing/von Neumann machines living cells can really reproduce themselves. Additionally current knowledge on the roles of non-coding RNAs indicates a radical violation of the central dogma of molecular biology and opens the way to a new revolution in life sciences.

Keywords: History of science; Paradigm shift; Information; Non-coding RNAs

Core tip: Sydney Brenner describes the radical revolution in life sciences during his lifetime: the occupation of biology by quantum mechanics, concerning the fundamental questions of matter and energy followed by the rise of genetics that showed that chromosomes were the carriers of genes. Biology is, in this respect, physics with computation, i.e., the bottom-top approach in biology is sufficient to solve all our goals in life science. In contrast to this we demonstrate, that biology and life is not only physics and digital information encoded in DNA sequences. In order to understand life in its whole complexity, the top-bottom processes such as occurs in epigenetics and non-coding RNA regulations leads to a new revolution in life sciences.