The Living Cell

The living cell is the unit of life. Therefore, without knowing how the cell works on the molecular level, it would be difficult to understand how embryos develop or how species evolve (Waddington 1957; Gerhart and Kirschner 1997; West-Eberhard 2003). Most experimental data on the living cell have been obtained from “dead” cells, since living cells must be destroyed in order to isolate their components for purification and analysis ( Sect. 3.1.5). To determine how living cells (dissipatons) work based on the experimental data measured from “dead” cells (equilibrons), however complete, is not an easy task, just as reconstructing musical melodies from sheet music would not be easy if one does not know the rules of mapping sheet music to audio music or does not have the ability to sing from sheet music. It is probably fair to say that, despite the massive amount of experimental data on the cell that has accumulated in the literature and on the World Wide Web as of the first decade of the twenty-first century, we still do not understand how the myriad structural components of the cell interact in space and time to exhibit the dynamic phenomena we recognize as life on the cellular level. The major goal of this book is to propose, in the form of a model of the living cell called the Bhopalator ( Fig. 2.11), the theoretical concepts, molecular mechanisms, and physicochemical laws and principles that may facilitate uncovering the rules that map cell structures to cell functions.