Today I'm going to talk a little bit about my specialty, which is, however, what you learn in high school.
High school biology textbooks and resource books, pretty much everything in Japan. All areas of the life sciences and biology are fairly well covered and in perfect harmony. As a result, it is good for keeping abreast of current trends in biology research, but I don't think many people will find it interesting to read. When the table of contents says something like "biodiversity and harmony," I think it is a high level of irony and am annoyed that it would be clearer and better if it said "harmony of biological societies". Now, let's not dwell on the preface. My question is a bit more scientific.
Modern biology has tried very hard to explain the wonders of life in the language of physics and chemistry. It is doing so with great success. Someday it will all be told in the language of physics and chemistry. Then the day will come when biology will cease to be what it has been and biology will begin anew as a branch of physics and chemistry. Medicine, too, can be interpreted as the biology of human disease and normalcy. In fact, 150 years ago, a pathologist named Wilhelow proposed cytopathology, the idea that the human body is a collection of cells, and that disease is the result of changes that occur in each cell. This is the very idea of modern medicine, isn't it? It is not old at all.
Now, assuming that such a day will come, what is the last remaining question specific to biology?
There is no correct answer, but there was one genetic question to start with. Why do children resemble their parents? Why do siblings not even resemble their parents? I think this was a great mystery, but now it is told in the molecular terms of the DNA sequence. The theory of evolution, which developed the theory of heredity on a time axis, also seems to be gaining a mathematical framework through the neutral theory, which is the achievement of the Japanese. This makes it clear that the discoveries of Mendel, Darwin, Watson, and Crick are particularly important in biology. And the brain-mind problem has also been making a lot of progress recently, and although I am not sure when we will arrive at the correct answer, I have a feeling that we will settle in a place where the correct answer is likely to be in this range. So what else is there? I think that the question of death (or, on the flip side, the question of life) will remain. There has been great progress in this area with the emergence of the new concept of apoptosis, or programmed cell death, but I don't think we have reached the last point, the difference between life and death. There is the idea that life is the efficient and coordinated occurrence of various chemical reactions in a compact space. Is the moment of death the moment when these efficient and coordinated chemical reactions break down? It seems plausible, but it also seems false. If there is some new discovery in this area, most of what is written in high school textbooks could be written (theoretically) in the language of physics and chemistry.
Translated with DeepL and edited by the author.