Event Detail

Watson Lecture - Rob Phillips: The Hidden Poetry of the Genome

Wednesday, February 26, 2025 at 7:30 p.m.

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Caltech

For more information call: 626-395-4652

Or click here: https://events.caltech.edu/calendar/watson-lecture-rob-phillips

One of the greatest achievements of the human mind is that, through sequences of symbols, we can represent incredibly complicated concepts, facts, feelings, and ideas. With the 26 letters in the English alphabet alone, our libraries are filled with words that can make us laugh or cry and call us to action. Strings of 0s and 1s are the language of the devices we now can no longer live without. A lucky subset of us find equally moving collections of mathematical symbols. The latest entries into this collection of symbols are the famed A, C, G, and T letters that make up the iconic DNA double helix. A whopping 10^17, of these As, Cs, Gs, and Ts have been deposited on NIH databases. Nonetheless, there is so much we don't know about their hidden meaning. In this talk, Rob Phillips, the Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics, Biology, and Physics, will describe the efforts of modern science to decipher this genomic Rosetta Stone. Though we can read and write DNA nearly at will, because of our lack of understanding of its real grammar, we are still unable to see its most meaningful hidden poetry. Phillips's talk will show how we are engaged in an experimental and theoretical mission to find the rules of that hidden poetry.