Has the age of the life sciences come?

01, life science is accelerating

Take the Nobel Prize, the most well-known award in the academic world, for example, among the three prizes in natural science, the physiology or medicine Prize is 100% awarded to the life sciences, and since 2000, about two-thirds of the Nobel Prize in chemistry has also been awarded to the life sciences.

If this is a comprehensive personal result, then the most immediate academic frontier is simply the unmistakable focus on the life sciences.

If you look at the latest papers in Nature and Science, the top journals in the academic world, you'll find that almost half of the research is in the life sciences.

As early as 2005, in order to commemorate the 125th anniversary of the founding of the journal, the science editorial board gathered the common wisdom of the top scientists of all mankind and put forward 125 important frontier questions, among which, life science issues accounted for 46%, and if you add 9% of cognitive science, life science can be said to occupy half the wall of the country.

All these phenomena prove a fact: the future is the era of life science.

Why was it proposed in these years and not earlier in the early 20th century or earlier?

This is no accident; in fact, it is the inevitable result of technological development.

02, the start of life science is the inevitable development of human technology

If you know more about the history of science, you may have wondered why Newton discovered the law of gravitation in the 17th century, Lavoisier named oxygen and hydrogen in the 18th century, but it was not until the 19th century that Darwin observed and proposed the macro theory of evolution, and it was not until the 20th century that humans rediscovered genetics and found human genetic material.

In fact, an important reason is that people's understanding of science is generally a process from simple systems to complex systems.

On the basis of the high development of mathematics, it is an important process of early physics to recognize physics through mathematics, and it is also a basic interpretation of the nature of the world is atoms.

On this basis, the understanding of the molecular world formed based on the combination of atoms led to the age of chemistry.

What about the life sciences? It is a more comprehensive composition based on complex chemical molecules, complex biological reactions between organic molecules, and more and more diversified and comprehensive complex systems from molecules to cells to individuals. The exploration of it is bound to be inseparable from the foundation of physics, chemistry and even mathematics. Because of this, the development of life science must be lagging behind and conditional. Just as the development of chemistry allowed us to understand the basic building blocks of life, such as proteins and nucleic acids, and the development of physics led to the discovery of DNA double helix.

Now that we have a rich knowledge of mathematics, physics, and chemistry, we are beginning to explore the life sciences, which will also try to solve the ultimate problems of mankind for the ages:

Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?

03, who am I?

These are questions of cognition and origin, each of which is a grand proposition.

The cognitive question is the crown of life science. How does our brain work? How is our behavior and psychology regulated? What are the mechanisms of brain function and disease? Can humans make additional use of the brain, such as brain-computer interfaces and artificial intelligence? Can we even create a brain? That is, to understand the brain, protect the brain, develop the brain and create the brain.

The same is true of the origin question, is life on Earth itself or is it alien? Was the earliest life DNA, RNA, protein, or something else? What is the evolutionary path of life?

04, where am I from?

There are at least two levels to this question, the question of origin and the question of medicine.

Origins Above, in medical matters, are human sex origins and sex determination problems really caused by XY? What is the development of the early human embryo? Can humans be born in artificial wombs? Will human Y chromatids disappear in the future? Can human egg cells regenerate?

05, where am I going?

The problem is primarily medical and cognitive science.

The former determines when human beings leave, after all, disease can be said to be a problem that human beings have been facing, from small colds and fever, to large cancer, coronary heart disease, etc., as well as the epidemic in recent years, are problems that our medicine has been trying to solve, and with the help of medicine, human life expectancy has increased sharply, especially since the 20th century. This is thanks to the joint efforts of countless doctors and scholars. The acceptance and future of death is also another important topic, and this content is not currently defined in life science, so many people still believe that there is another world after death.

Of course, the development of life science is not only these lofty topics, but also practical solutions for our human beings.