Gemeinsame Veranstaltung mit dem Italienischen Generalkonsulat
(Event in English)
Biology is an attempt to answer outstanding questions: What are we made of? How do our bodies function? Why do they sometimes stop to function? During the last couple of centuries, we learned that cells are the minimal units of life and are made of billions of distinct molecules. Although this answers part of the question of what we are made of, it does not answer how cellular functions spontaneously emerge from the interaction of these billions of molecules. Thanks to breathtaking developments in structural biology, we have started to have a precise atlas of all the molecules in our cells. What we want to understand now is the role of individual molecules and the choreography that organizes them in functional units, which ultimately distinguishes a living cell from an inanimate object. In this lecture, I will discuss that gaining this understanding is an outstanding challenge that requires novel concepts and an interdisciplinary approach. I will explain how integrating methods and theories from physics, artificial intelligence, and modern computers provides us with new, powerful tools to understand how life is organized at the cellular level.
