Physics for maggots - CANCELED

When a fruit fly lays an egg, in twenty four hours that single cell transforms into a fully functioning maggot;   within just three hours, a blueprint for the body plan can be read from the spatially varying concentrations of just a few different molecules.  These molecules are at very low concentrations, yet the whole process is extraordinarily precise and reproducible.  These and other observations point to several physics problems which arise quite commonly in thinking about biological systems.  Our most dramatic progress has come by elevating extreme precision to an optimization principle, leading to successful quantitative predictions for the behaviors of the underlying molecular networks, with no free parameters.  

Speaker: Bill Bialek, Princeton Univ.