Re: Metabolic closure in (M,R)-systems

[Athel Cornish-Bowden <***>]

Tim wrote:

> I just found a pre-print of the paper here, at one of the authors' site:

> http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/rosen.htm

Glad you found this. In due course (once volume, page and year
are known --  I optimistically put 2005 on the HTML version, but
it's more likely to be 2006, given the backlog) I'll post a PDF
file of the paper in its published form.

When I visited my own pages today I found that all the figures were
missing. I have now fixed this. Sorry about the problem, which
was due to my forgetting that Unix treats capitals and lower-case
letters in filenames differently. (Everything worked fine when I
checked the pages locally, but not once they got on the server.)

Earlier in the same message, Tim wrote:

> I think the use of some different phraseology on their part is due
> in some part to a need to appeal to the editors of JTB or similar
> publications. But I do think that some of the negative remarks
> about Rosen's work are needlessly hyperbolic.

For the first part, not really. We changed the terminology for the
reason we gave, that we want to be intelligible to biologists outside
the immediate Rosen circle, and we didn't think we could be that
if we used standard biological words like "replication" with entirely
different meanings from those used in biology, or if we avoided
words like "catalyst" and "enzyme" that virtually everyone uses.

Lack of intelligibility is a problem that needs to be taken by anyone
on this list (or elsewhere) who wants to bring Rosen's ¦uvre to a
wider public. At a meeting in Sheffield (you can see what sort of
meeting it was in the meeting report at
http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/genomebi.htm) in January I spoke a
little about Rosen, and included the rash statement that few biologists
had ever heard of him. This proved to be wrong, as several people
told me afterwards that they had heard of him but that they had
not been able to make sense of what he was saying, and couldn't see
how it related to life as everyone else thought they understood it.
I had a similar experience a couple of months later at a meeting in
France. It appears that plenty of biologists have heard of Robert
Rosen, but hardly anyone is trying to advance his ideas in the
primary biological literature. Olaf Wolkenhauer is certainly one of
the few, and Jannie Hofmeyr is another, though in his case I don't
think he has started publishing his ideas yet.

For the second part, what "negative remarks"? We thought we were
displaying a lot of admiration for Rosen, and we'd be worried if
we thought that anything falling short of calling him "Biology's
Newton" would be taken as needlessly hyperbolic and negative.

Earlier, Judith said that she disputed "the claim made that Robert
Rosen 'never explained the mathematical context nor gave any
mathematical or biological examples'". OK, one can dispute it, but
to dispute it effectively one needs to point to some examples.

athel


--
--
Athel Cornish-Bowden
***
http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/homepage.htm