In the early 1940s, as war raged over the continent, the British mathematician Freeman Dyson and the Indian physicist Harish Chandra were taking a walk in Cambridge. Harish Chandra was studying theoretical physics under the legendary Paul Dirac while Dyson was getting ready to spend a depressing time calculating bombing statistics at Bomber Command.

“I have decided to leave physics for mathematics”, quipped Harish Chandra. “I find physics messy, unrigorous, elusive”. “That’s interesting”, replied Dyson. “I am planning to leave mathematics for physics for exactly the same reason.” Leave their respective disciplines the two did, and both of them had highly distinguished careers in their new fields at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
 (More)

Harald zur Hausen's discovery of the link between infection and cancer provides a window into what may turn out to be one of the most fascinating lines of inquiry in twenty-first century medical research: the link between microorganisms and what have been traditionally considered chronic diseases.

This line of inquiry is founded on an evolutionary truth. Bacteria and viruses have been human beings' most constant companions, existing on this planet billions of years before we did and greeting us as we climbed out of the trees and walked out of Africa. Since the very beginning we have been engaged in an arms race with microbes. The conventional wisdom is that these arms races have led to an essentially benign co-existence between us and "them". But recent thinking has challenged this widespread belief and the truth appears to be more complicated. (More)

The impact of chemistry and physics to biomedicine apparently has its future in neuroscience according to Erwin Neher. The entire panel discussed various topics (you can read about some of the highlights here), but for me Neher dominated the conversation with his visions of the brain. (More)

Monday morning Jack Szostak talked about his ongoing work on creating artificial cells, where he is trying to create simple protocells from chemically synthesized material that in their simplest form only contain a membrane and genetic material.

Later in the afternoon Hamilton Smith gave a detailed account of the work by the J. Craig Venter Institute cumulating in the synthetic cell paper published in Science on May 20 (doi:10.1126/science.1190719, fulltext freely available). (More)

The Video Diary team proudly presents their first two videos from Lindau, the Meeting, the attendees, superfluid beer, soccer and more. Enjoy! (More)

This morning at the Lindau Nobel meeting we had a panel discussion about the Impact of Chemistry and Physics to Biomedicine. Where is the Future? I've summarized some of the highlights below, using the Twitter comments of this session (following the conference Twitter feed at #lnlm10 is highly recommended). The young researchers were asked to submit questions to the panel, and they were used as starting points for the panel discussion (the Lindau version of an unconference session). (More)

The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer.  Indeed, the measure of our intellectual maturity is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.- G.W. Allport,Becoming, 1955

Science in the popular mind consists of a series of "Eureka!" moments. Such moments are supposed to suddenly propel scientific fields ahead at accelerating rates. Many anecdotes from scientific history seem to confirm this belief. It all begins with Archimedes jumping out of the bath after discovering the principle of buoyancy. Other examples include the apple falling on Isaac Newton’s head, August Kekule waking up from a dream and realizing the structure of benzene, Enrico Fermi discovering slow neutrons by ‘randomly’ substituting a block of paraffin for a tabletop, Alexander Fleming ‘accidentally’ discovering the action of a famous mold on bacteria, and Werner Heisenberg discovering the awesome structure of the quantum world after an all-night session on the island of Heligoland in the North Sea. (More)

The late morning in Lindau was a non-stop marathon of medical researchers - first Harald zur Hausen talked about the links between infections and cancer, then Luc Montagnier gave an insight into his research that analyzes DNA under physical as well as biological aspects - venomous tongues may have linked that talk to homeopathy. At last Francoise Barré-Sinoussi talked about the discovery of HIV and how it was faciliated by global translational research. (More)

Now that the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting is less only a few days away, it is time to get into the right mood for the meeting. One of the best ways of doing that is reading a good science book. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks written by Rebecca Skloot is such a book. The book was published earlier this year, and the German translation will be available in September.  (More)

I am one of the lucky people who may attend the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting several times. This will be my third time. But there’s a big BUT: The more often I have been, the more sad I am about all the other meetings I have missed. This year, the Lindau meetings celebrate their 60th anniversary and the list of Laureates and lectures is the largest in the history of the meeting. One of the most outstanding persons I have never had chance to listen or even talk to at Lindau is the Grand Dame of Sciences Rita Levi-Montalcini (101). (More)

There are many reasons to get excited in anticipation of this year's Lindau Nobel meeting that is now less than two weeks away. One aspect of the meeting I personally enjoy is the appreciation for the historical perspective of science. One recurring theme of many Nobel laureates in Medicine or Physiology during the last 50 years is the fascinating relationship between infections and cancer, and in fact this year marks the 100th anniversary of one of first important discoveries in the field.

Peyton Rous (Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1966) in 1910 described a malignant chicken sarcoma which could be propagated by transplanting its cells, forming new tumors in other chicken. He also showed that these tumors were caused by a virus (the Rous Sarcoma Virus), but it took 15 years of discussions before the scientific community unanimously accepted this connection. In the 1930s Rous discovered that the giant warts (benign tumors of the skin that can progress to cancer) of rabbits in the Southwestern US were caused by papilloma viruses. (More)