The Web of Life

Introduction In February 1943, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger, one of the founders of quantum theory, gave a series of three lectures at Trinity College in Dublin with the title What is Life?. These lectures changed the course of the life sciences. In the lectures, and in the subsequent book with the same title, Schrodinger advanced clear and compelling hypotheses about the molecular structure of genes, which stimulated biologists to think about genetics in a novel way, and in so doing opened a new frontier of science, molecular biology.