28 March 2025
Amy Shyer & Alan Rodrigues
Laboratory of Morphogenesis
Rockefeller University
The dominant approach to the study of living systems in the 20th century and into today has been that of a reductionist approach focused on genetics and biochemistry. Such reductionism has gone hand in hand with an ontology of the machine. We will discuss how viewing life as if it emanated from a set of molecular machines is a potential bottleneck in addressing key questions in biology. Further, we will discuss how moving beyond it is not contingent on new technologies but rather a refreshed perspective of life that can be termed "organic". We will suggest that the study of how form arises, morphogenesis, is key to an organic renewal of biology and biomedicine. Although morphogenesis is currently seen as a subsidiary branch of developmental biology as well as the consequence of molecular patterning processes at the subcellular scale, we will argue that morphology and its self-organizing capacity at the supracellular scale is a fundamental nexus in embryonic development as well as disease. The inability to appreciate form through an organic supracellular perspective is perhaps the principal bottleneck for making inroads into health issues such as cancer and the chronic disease epidemic.