Getting up to speed in molecular biology

One evening in October 1816 Charles Cowden Clarke introduced his friend John Keats to an English translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey that the playwright George Chapman had published 200 years earlier.

The translation, which recast the ancient epics in Elizabethan verse, so entranced Keats that he and Cowden Clarke stayed up all night reading it. By the morning of the next day, Keats had written one of the most famous poems in all of English literature, the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer":

Keats was just 20 when he composed the sonnet, which adheres to the form named after the 14th-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca: 14 lines divided into an octet with the rhyme scheme a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a followed by a sestet with the rhyme scheme c-d-c-d-c-d.

The fact that the poem flows so naturally, despite its demanding form, is a testament to Keats’s poetic power. It also reminds us that in some fields, such as music, chess, and theoretical physics, genius flourishes early.

Why should that be the case? As far as I can tell, the leading theory starts with the observation that our brains are the most creative, inventive, and powerful between the ages of 22 and 32. Taking advantage of that peak entails entering a field, like chess, whose rules and principles can be mastered quickly. By the time Albert Einstein reached the age of 26 in 1905, he already knew enough mathematics and physics to publish four revolutionary papers.

Like physics, molecular biology has some core concepts. A protein, for example, can be thought of as a three-dimensional blob whose function depends on its specific shape and charge distribution. But that abstraction isn’t much help when you’re figuring out how a particular protein does its job. And there are 10⁵ molecular structures in the Protein Data Bank.

Becoming proficient in molecular biology requires learning many more facts than is the case for physics—which raises the question: Is there a way to shorten molecular biology’s learning curve? Finding an answer is important, given the difficulty of certain biological problems, such as identifying the physical basis of human consciousness or curing Alzheimer’s disease. A biologist version of Einstein could make the difference.

The part of the eponymous main character in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet runs to about 16 000 words. Could students of molecular biology learn their amino acids, nucleotides, and so on in the same way that actors learn their lines—that is, by reading and reciting them? Possibly, but the facts of molecular biology are not like the lines of a play, which follow one another in a single, linear stream. Biological facts are interconnected in complex conceptual networks.

There is, however, one way in which biology is like a play’s unfolding plot. Sometime between the formation of Earth 4.5 billion years ago and first evidence of biological activity 3.7 billion years ago, life on Earth began. We don’t yet know the details of the process, but it did involve the evolution of ever more complex structures.

Now imagine a movie documentary that followed the evolution of life from its origin to the first multicelled organisms. The movie would play not on a TV or computer screen but in a virtual reality space, like Star Trek‘s holodeck. Images could be resized by the viewer. They would be annotated and hyperlinked to other information. But if you wanted to, you could simply sit and watch as the evolution of life proceeds (sped up, of course).

My wild surmise is that such a movie, if it could ever be made, might prove effective at uploading to a student’s brain the essential facts and principles of biology. Then, evolution, the great underlying principle of life, would also serve as the great underlying principle for learning about life.