What is life?
Biology 281H
09-25-2017
Concept Goals
- Begin to appreciate how bizarrely cool life is.
- Understand the intellectual and practical framework for this class.
Discuss with your neighbor
- What is life?
- What differentiates life from non-life?
What is life?
- Living Things are Composed of Cells
- Living Things Have Different levels of organization
- Living Things Use Energy
- Living Things Respond To Their Environment
- Living Things Grow
- Living Things Reproduce
- Living Things Adapt To Their Environment
Schroedinger's dilemma: how can a small number of molecules behave in an ordered way?
$PV = nRT$
Course Goals
- Survey the key molecular and cellular features shared by all organisms on earth, revealing how life can be understood in physical and chemical terms.
- Begin to develop intuition and analytical tools to think about life quantitatively and molecularly.
- Introduce several key, universal systems that are shared across organisms
Easy to get lost in details...
Gerhard Michal, Roche
Focus on how and why rather than memorizing facts!
Implementation
- In-class discussions
- Reading/Prep
- Pre-discussion quizzes
- Homework sets
- Labs