Adam Arkin's doing for cells what electrical engineers did for computer chips: building a simulator of the complex chains of chemical reactions.
Hacking the Cell's Circuitry
By Christine Gorman
Biologists have spent much of the past century taking cells apart to figure out what makes them tick. Adam Arkin, 33, a physical chemist who divides his time between the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, wants to put the pieces back together again. His goal is to create a computer model of how the cell works so that someday he'll be able to design his own cells from scratch.
It's a daunting task. A single enzyme in a liver cell may be controlled by as many as 14 different regulatory processes. Multiply that by thousands of interconnected chemical reactions operating simultaneously in billions of cells, and you've got one incredibly complex system. But Arkin knows that computer-chip designers manage similar levels of complexity. "Good engineers in the 1960s could probably understand all the circuitry that people had built," Arkin says. "But when integrated circuits were developed, that became impossible." There were just too many pieces to put together.
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Name: Adam Arkin Age: 33 Why critics are taking note: Arkin, a physical chemist, is trying to create a computer model of how the cell works |
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Dynamical Genomics
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Listen to excerpts from TIME reporter Christine Gorman's interview with Adam Arkin. |
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