Rare Events in Biology

Part of the PCTS Conference Series on "Rare Events"
Date
Feb 3, 2010Feb 4, 2010
Location
PCTS, Jadwin Hall, Room 407

Details

Event Description

Organizers: Jeremy England and Ned Wingreen

Most of life gets spent waiting for something interesting to happen. Cancers arise only once a particular combination of chance mutations enable a cell to divide unchecked and start invading neighboring tissues. A protein may spend much of its time on its way to being folded dwelling in unfolded or misfolded conformations until the right fluctuation jolts it into its native shape. And whether in the test tube or out in the wild, it is often a sudden event, such as the introduction of a toxic drug, or a dramatic change in climate, that confers selective advantages on particular members of genetically diverse populations of organisms. The common thread among all these stories is the importance of rare events to the dynamics of biological systems. The purpose of this symposium is to examine the impact of rare events on biology from both theoretical and experimental perspectives, at length scales ranging from single molecules to whole species, and in a variety of contexts including the clinical and the ecological.
 

Sponsors
  • PCTS
  • D.E. Shaw & Co