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William Bialek
I am interested in the interface between physics and biology,
broadly interpreted. A central theme in my research is an
appreciation for how well things work in biological systems.
It is, after
all, some notion of functional behavior that distinguishes life
from inanimate matter, and it is a challenge to quantify this
functionality in a language that parallels our characterization
of other
physical systems. Strikingly, when we do this (and there are not
so many cases where it has been done!), the performance of
biological systems often approaches some limits set by basic
physical principles. While it is popular to view biological
mechanisms as an historical record of evolutionary and
developmental compromises, these observations on functional
performance point
toward a very different view of life as having selected a set of
near optimal mechanisms for its most crucial tasks. Even if this
view is wrong, it suggests a theoretical physicist's
idealization; the
construction of this idealization and the attempt to calibrate
the performance of real biological systems against this ideal
provides a productive route for the interaction of theory and
experiment,
and in several cases this effort has led to the discovery of new
phenomena. The idea of performance near the physical limits
crosses many levels of biological organization, from single
molecules to cells to perception and learning in the brain, and I
have tried to contribute to this whole range of problems.
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S e l e c t e d P u b l i c a t i o n s:
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