Stuart Kauffman '61, the second of this term's Mongtomery Fellows, yesterday addressed in front of a packed Rocky 3 the topics of life's emergence on Earth and the possibility of life elsewhere.
Kauffman's lecture, titled "At Home in the Universe, Is Life Probable Everywhere?" drew a capacity crowd that overflowed from Rocky 3 into Rocky 2, where students watched the speech on a large-screen television.
Half stand-up comedian and half lecturing theoretical biologist, Kauffman began by speculating whether there could be life on Mars.
If there were life on the "Red Planet," Kauffman said, the most important possible consequence could occur if life on Mars were dramatically different from Earth, in which case scientists would be confronted with the first time in our intellectual history with the means to invent a general biology.
He asserted that because this was a completely unexplored area of science, the most important step in beginning to research all of the possibilities presented would be the asking of questions.
"The science which is the best of sciences and the most confusing of sciences is the forming of questions, or protoscience," he told the audience. "I've always told my students that you must have faith in yourselves as questioner and your sense of what an important question is. No one can tell you that."
Kauffman is part of a group of scientific researchers with the Santa Fe Institute who want to examine the possibilities of life elsewhere by trying to create a self-reproducing molecular system similar to that which might be found on Mars.
He cited the work of one of his colleagues, who has already made the first self-reproducing protein. Because of the success of the project, Kauffman said half-jokingly, it is only a matter of time before he and his colleagues produce an entire self-reproducing system.
Kauffman was a faculty member in department of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania from 1975 to 1993.
Since 1986 he has received numerous honors and awards, including the Borden Prize for Research, the Weiner Gold Medal of the American Cybernetic Society, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.
Kauffman is a theoretical biologist and a leader in complexity theory, applied molecular evolution, origins of life, and developmental genetics. He has written two books, "Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution" and "At Home in the Universe."
