This year, 18 Hyman Lab members made the journey to San Fransciso!
The annual ASCB meeting was a success and as Program Chair, Tony was honored to give the introduction speech. For the ASCB Annual Meeting Videos, click here.
The excerpt is from his opening remarks:
Any field faces two challenges: How to keep introducing new ideas and techniques to the field, and how to apply these discoveries to human health. In terms of introducing new ideas to the field, in my opinion, the greatest step forward in the last decade has been the application of the physical sciences to cell biology. The behaviour of a cell emerges from the collective property of the millions of molecules in a cell, rather like the pattern of a swarm of birds, which emerges from the interaction of all the flying birds in that swarm. However, just as knowledge of how a bird flaps its wings does not tell us how the swarm has its pattern, knowledge of molecules does not tell us how a cell is organized. The physical sciences provide us with the tools and techniques to answer such problems. We therefore believe the introduction of the physical sciences to cell biology is central to the endeavor.
In the last decade, it has never been clearer that medicine must be understood at the level of the cell. Only by understanding the pathology of cells can we understand why the body as a whole does not function. In the next few years, we must focus on understanding how the basic physiology that we have sorted out over the last half-century varies in disease.
Therefore, we have introduced these two subjects to the meeting as threads. One thread in intersections of physical sciences and the other thread cell biology medicine. You can follow these subjects everyday if you so wish, and I believe, have a superb introduction to the state of the art in both these fields.