ABSTRACT
It is no accident that biology, the branch of science devoted to studying living systems, lagged behind the physical sciences in development. The fact of the matter is that living systems are a lot more complicated than non-living ones. It can be argued that a single amoeba, for example, is more complex than an entire galaxy, and that the human brain, composed of billions of interconnected neurons, is the most complex system in the universe. Small wonder, then, that the science of life was slower to develop. Like the physical sciences, however, biology underwent a profound transformation in the post-Newtonian world. Basically, it went from being a science devoted to describing and cataloguing living things to a science concerned with the working of cells as the basic unit of living systems. I will call this the “cellular turn,” and, as we shall see, it was a precursor to the emphasis on the interactions of molecules in today’s biology. Unlike the events surrounding Isaac Newton’s work, however, the shift in attention to cells was gradual, with no single person leading the transition. In what follows, then, I will pick scientists who illustrate this new way of thinking and ask you to keep in mind that the final product was the work of many scientists who we don’t have space to discuss.
