February 27, 2012 - IMM@BUCT

plained by simple recourse to physical and
chemical laws alone. Baum finds himself
in disagreement with at least some of what
Polanyi writes but ducks an attempt to reconstruct
the arguments that are involved.
However, a few words on the historical
aspects of the issues involved might be of
some interest.
Polanyi is credited with keeping alive
the idea that there is much more to understanding
biology than a strict reductionism
can provide. In two of his major
works, “Personal Knowledge” and “The
Tacit Dimension,” he wrote of the concept
of emergence, the idea that the structure
and organization of an entity, be it a machine
such as a wristwatch or a biological
cell, exert what philosophers refer to as a
downward causation on the basic physical
and chemical processes that the entity
engages in. The organization and threedimensional
structure of the cell determine
how certain reactions occur, how
components of the cell are transported,
and so on. One can say, then, that while everything
that goes on in the cell is in accord
with the laws of physics and chemistry,
the properties that we think of as cellular
can’t be accounted for simply by supplying
a list of the molecules and their amounts;
they emerge from the cell’s structure and
organization.
Polanyi wrote on these matters near
the end of his career, and in a time when
reductionism was the ideal toward which
science reached. He did not get all the biology
right, and he tilted at some windmills
he might better have left alone. In truth,
his C&EN piece is rather turgidly written
and not always clear. But while he did not
actually invent the notion of emergence,
Polanyi was prophetic in expounding upon
it when he did. In the 1990s, emergence
theory arose to become a significant topic
of discussion in biology and the philosophy
of science.
Theodore L. Brown
Estero , Fla.
IN 40 YEARS of practicing science, I
couldn’t help but confirm my intimate
belief that society is ultimately ruled by
the philosophers and not by scientists and
engineers. Even if we had the firm conviction
that everything in the heavens and on
Earth is reducible to physical interaction
and to the stringent laws of causality, this
wouldn’t be more than a philosophical ideology,
because we have not made the world;
we just discover it and try to fit our gained
LETTERS
knowledge into hypotheses and theories.
For this reason, I stopped criticizing
philosophers on scientific and technical
grounds; this would be equivalent to cutting
the branch of the tree whereupon I
am sitting. Philosophers may, however, be
criticized on philosophical grounds. For
example, someone pretending that every
material process is reducible to physical
causality would have to assume that human
action is also reducible to physical causality
(after all, we are made of atoms). But
assuming this, we can no longer uphold the
concepts of freedom and moral responsibility,
and we cannot justify either to reward
or to punish someone for what he has
done, because everything on Earth would
then be a pure mechanical action-reaction
mechanism, outside the categories of good
and evil, governed solely by the laws of
causality. Denying the transcendence of
life will at the same time deny the inalienable
rights of the human being and the possibility
of a lawful, organized, and civilized
society!
Philosophers such as Michael Polanyi
expressed this early in a terminology that
we should at least try to understand. Biology,
“the science of life,” will, for the philosophical
reasons given above, never be a
molecular science in the deterministiccausal
sense. This affirmation by no means
excludes molecular biology as an integrating
and very helpful part of the science of
life. Similarly, the fact that information
transfer can be tied to deterministic-causal
physical processes (if not, we couldn’t copy
a file onto our hard disk), does not mean
that information is always of deterministiccausal
nature.
It is noteworthy that the (empirically
found!) second principle of thermodynamics
states that the entropy of a closed
system is not bound to any conservation
law, and according to our observation, it is
generally increasing with time. Entropy,
in a mathematical sense, is the logarithm
of the information content of the system.
In other words, according to our empirical
findings, the information content of
a closed system may, and generally does,
increase with time.
As information can be the cause of a
physical process, we must conclude that
there are not only physical but also nonphysical
causes of physical processes. The
second principle of thermodynamics is the
principle of transcendence of life!
Edgar Müller
Prilly , Switzerland
TOKYO ELECTRIC POWER CO.
THIS WEEK
ONLINE
Little Radiation From
Fukushima Reached U.S.
After an earthquake and tsunami struck
Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power
plant last March, the plant released
radioactive gases and particulates that
circled the globe. Now scientists estimate
the material boosted soil radioactivity
in the U.S. by on average 3 to 10%.
cenm.ag/env65
Paper Device Monitors
Liver Health
An alarming side effect of many
medications is liver damage, which
if unchecked can cause death. Monitoring
liver damage is a challenge in
developing regions without access to
clinical tools and skilled personnel. Now
researchers have created a cheap device
made of paper to quickly and easily
measure a patient’s liver health without
a hospital’s laboratory tools.
cenm.ag/anl55
Drug Delivery Hooked
On Sugar
In an advance for drug delivery, researchers
have demonstrated that they
can slip large biological molecules inside
cells by tagging them with small molecules
called boronates. The boronates
deliver molecular cargo by reacting with
sugars on the cell surface. The researchers
hope the new delivery method will
aid the development of treatments for
cancer and other diseases.
cenm.ag/bio13
Introducing Fine Line
CENtral Science introduces its newest
blog, Fine Line. C&EN Senior Editor
Rick Mullin covers the fine chemicals
market, keeping you up-to-date on
the latest moves by companies and
changes in industry regulations. In his
first post, he describes the mood at the
Informex meeting in New Orleans after
recent changes in senior management
at several firms.
cenblog.org/fine-line
WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG 3 FEBRUARY 27, 2012