The Self-Manufacturing Cell - JAN-HENDRIK HOFMEYR

(Yogi)

As part of our outreach program, we organize a series of public online discussion sessions with philosophers, biologists, and other researchers who do work that is relevant to our own project. The format is that of a short introductory presentation by our guests, followed by a panel discussion and a Q&A session involving the whole audience.

This discussion revolves around Jannie’s work on modeling a whole self-manufacturing cell. He builds on the relational approach developed by the theoretical biologist Robert Rosen, who first proposed a principle of closure (to what he called efficient causation) as the distinguishing feature of living systems. Jannie, in a series of important papers published in 2017, 2018, and 2021 adapts Rosen’s theory to the actual biochemical and structural organization of a cell, and extends the formalism to include the possibility of open-ended behavior and evolution. We discuss the challenges of capturing life in a model, and what we can learn from theory in biology which combines mathematical and conceptual aspects.

Jan-Hendrik (Jannie) Hofmeyr is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Stellenbosch. He is a molecular cell physiologist with varied research interests: computational systems biology, metabolic regulation within the framework of control analysis, code biology, and category theoretical modeling. Since discovering the work of Robert Rosen, he has focused on understanding how living cells are able to manufacture themselves autonomously, or, in Rosen's words, how they are closed to efficient causation.

For those of you who'd like to learn more, there is a three-part interview with Jannie and Yogi called "Mapping Theories of Life into Cell Biochemistry:" (YouTube links embedded). There, we discuss Rosen, Jannie's own modeling efforts, and the next steps a theory of the organism needs to take in a lot more detail.

And here is Rosen's classic book "Life Itself."