The venerable Harvey Society, which sponsors a lecture series of scientific interest each year, observed its 100th birthday with a suite of distinguished speakers at The Rockefeller University's Caspary Auditorium on May 19, touching upon advances in science, the culture of science, and the gems of wisdom culled in laboratory investigations. Weill Cornell Medical College was a sponsor of the 100th Anniversary Symposium, which was open to the public.
William Harvey, the society's namesake, did much to sow the seeds of biology as a robust academic discipline, arguing the body is a machine that follows physical laws. The philosopher Descartes himself acknowledged Harvey as an important predecessor and inspiration.
The four speakers from The Rockefeller University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center were all Nobel laureates.
Dr. Harold Varmus, president and CEO of MSKCC, spoke of breakthroughs in molecular oncology, in medicine's ongoing battle to fight cancer.
Dr. Paul Greengard, professor of neuroscience at Rockefeller, discussed signal transduction in the nervous system, reflecting his expertise on neurotransmitters.
Dr. Joshua Lederberg, Sackler Scholar at Rockefeller, received the Nobel Prize in 1958, at the age of 33, on the genetic structure and function in microorganisms. He led a talk on the rich academic history of New York, the "city of science."
Sir Paul Nurse, president of The Rockefeller University, spoke of the "great ideas" of biology - their important, unifying principles, including the cell, the gene, and evolution by natural selection. He received an effusive introduction from Dr. Fred Maxfield, chairman of the Department of Biochemistry at Weill Cornell.
"Biology is a subject that revels in details," Sir Nurse said.
For a grand finale, Dr. Thomas Frieden, the New York City commissioner of public health, declared May 19, 2005 Harvey Society Day - a fitting way to honor the centennial of its birth.
The Great Ideas of Biology (summarized from Sir Nurse's lecture)
THE CELL: The cell is the basic unit of life, the building blocks of all living things. The cell's discovery was motivated by a search for the building blocks of matter, including ourselves. Under a microscope, scientists discovered the structural units of life - and soon realized they were functional units as well, marking a giant leap in biological thought.
THE GENE: The gene is the basic unit of heredity. Gregor Mendel, a 19th-century monk, arrived at his eureka moment through gardening, as he noted his pea plants' characteristics (or phenotypes), then cross-bred them to achieve hybrids. Observing the offspring, he noted physical constancies, as well as the disappearance and re-emergence of traits among generations. He also noticed that most characteristics appeared in offspring without any blending of the parents' characteristics. He soon realized that variations were mathematically predictable over time. He concluded the plants' inheritance must be some kind of particle - fixed and unchanging, with a coded form of information. He further deduced that two such particles - one from the female, one from the male - were interacting with each other to determine the expression of characteristics. He began to articulate the mechanics of inheritance, laying the groundwork for future discoveries of chromosomes and DNA.
EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION: First popularized by Charles Darwin, this concept has two prerequisites: life must progress upon a hereditary system, in which information defining characteristics is copied; and this system must have variability, genetically inherited. Such imperfect replication forms the basis for evolution by natural selection - in which those with the most robust genes command more food and resources, and produce more offspring to carry on their legacy.
LIFE AS CHEMISTRY: The idea that life's processes are reducible to chemistry, which produces the metabolism and growth we observe in living things. Thousands of chemical reactions transpire simultaneously in one cell; the sequencing and sheer number of such reactions help to fuel our lives. Louis Pasteur tapped into this principle with his ideas of fermentation, in which a living organism is responsible for chemical changes.