Soon after arriving in America in 1989, I was introduced to the head of the theoretical biology department at Columbia University. At that time, it shone on par with Stanford, Harvard, and Yale. The breakthrough that Columbia University made after World War II was due to the arrival of many outstanding European scientists who fled Hitler. More precisely, those who were lucky enough not to end up in concentration camps, or to be destroyed in some other inhuman way, but miraculously escaped in America (even outstanding Europeans could come to it during a simultaneous war with both Germany and Japan - on two fronts at once – it was oh, how not easy!). Who in the vast majority (for a reason which deserves investigation in itself) settled in New York or its environs. Like Einstein, who chose Princeton, an hour's freeway drive from Manhattan. A super-island that, like the Athens of Pericles two millennia earlier, attracted 20th-century intellectuals like a magnet.

Let us recall by the way that the project to create an atomic bomb, the center of which was located in Los Alamos (New Mexico), was called Manhattan. And the structure for the creation of atomic weapons, which included 130 thousand people, located thousands of kilometers from New York, was named the Manhattan Engineering District. A trifle that was not a trifle at all, behind which stood something very serious. Global. All-human. Characterizing the Epoch.

Some of the European luminaries who created physics in the 20th century, having reached retirement age, continued to work in the 80s. Students of the stars of European science formed the backbone of Columbia throughout the decades that followed the Second World War. Having worked until the time when they let me into the Promised Superpower, having released me from the USSR.

Having heard at the conference the speech of the famous person with whose mention I began this article, one of those who distributed grants in biophysics throughout America, I approached him during a coffee break, but in reality created for the sake of communication, and said, that perhaps he would be interested in my theoretical article on approximately the same topic.

- Are there formulas in your work? – asked the Luminary of Theoretical Biology.

- Formulas? In a theoretical paper on protein structure and protein function?

- Exactly.

- Of course have. But what about a theoretical article without formulas?

- In that case, don’t send it. I still won't read it.

- A... Why? – I asked dumbfounded.

- I don't trust formulas.

- So how is it? Don't trust formulas as such, regardless of whether they are correct or incorrect?

- Exactly!

- A... ah... what do you trust? – trying to maintain politeness on my face (so as not to ruin relations with my colleagues from Colombia forever), I asked.

- To the number! – the head of the New York Theoretical Biology said weightily. Influenced the directions of research in this science supported by the US government.

After this conversation impressed me (just as the message about it, I think, will also impress you), I decided to stay away from Columbia University.

Perhaps in vain.

Because these words of the scientist (whose name is not given for ethical reasons) turned out to be prophetic. If he had said them thirty years later - that is, today - they would have sounded like they were self-evident!

In the era of computers-displays-printers-gadgets, which have replaced books on every scientist’s desk, the overwhelming number of articles in any field of biology that contain modeling or theory either contain no formulas at all or only the most primitive ones. And then – computer calculations and graphs. Which were once built by hand with great difficulty. And now any student with a grade level can easily build by pressing a couple of buttons. And the more meaningless the article, the more beautiful graphs decorate it! And there are more of them in every scientific work! Moreover, these graphics are so beautiful and so visual that they fascinate, like the paintings of El Greco and Raphael. Leaving any formulas (which require reflection and understanding in order to understand them) so far behind that only a fool can put a Formula on a pedestal. Raised in the pre-computer stone age.

The same applies to physics, although not to such a provocative degree. And also to any area of ​​modeling something at the beginning of the Third Millennium.

Looking back at the era when personal computers with a laser printer (technological innovations) cost like a car (under ten thousand dollars), from a quarter century removed into the Future, I understand that the mistrust of the head of the school of biophysics at Columbia University in the formulas was justified. There are few laws in biology similar to the laws of Mendelian gene segregation, or the complementarity of DNA nucleotides. More precisely, at present it is not enough. But there are incomparably more of those who describe the system empirically, rather than using theoretically selected expressions. For example, the conformations of macromolecules in models are calculated based on a set of mathematical expressions with coefficients, which in exponents are numbers in which there are several “messy” digits after the decimal point in each digit. And not at all with integers, as in Newton’s or Coulomb’s laws. Such models describe enzymatic dynamics, protein structure, biosynthesis and many other systems more accurately every year. But does this mean that all, or most, of biology is organized in the same empirical way, not in human understanding, but in reality? That elegant equations no less than the general theory of relativity, the Boltzmann distribution and Maxwell's equations do not describe biological processes?

My personal conviction is that this is not the case when it comes to Life. That the semi-empirical style of scientific work using computers is a temporary phenomenon. That the laws describing the structure and function in the living world are as elegant and graceful as Maxwell's equations, the Boltzmann distribution, the laws of Universal Gravitation and Coulomb. That the patterns due to which living things exist in a wide variety of forms are no less accurate than the laws of physics. That the functioning of biomolecules, organelles, biocenosis, cells, and organs of the body is based on deep principles that humanity has yet to discover. And these principles are expressed not just by a set of numbers, and not by calculations based on semi-empirical coefficients, but by exact (even probabilistic) laws. And there are a lot of these laws (not contradicting the laws of Physics, but based on them, but relating to matter at a higher level of organization of matter, with an incomparably larger number of component parts).

Nevertheless, looking at modern science, we have to admit that the mistrust of the head of the biophysical school of Columbia University at the end of the 20th century was justified. And it was precisely such views that determined the style of scientific research in subsequent decades, right up to the time in which we were lucky enough to live.

What do you think about what has been said, enlightened, highly respected reader?

Yury Magarshak

22 August 22nd

NY

Правильно ли не доверять формулам?