A new view of biology
January 26, 2021Princeton
Cliff Brangwynne was seeing cells in the sidewalk again.
It was another long day in the lab at Harvard Medical School, where Brangwynne would often work late nights, staring at cells. Sometimes he spent so much time staring at cells through the microscope that the cells would follow him home, their shapes imprinted on his vision. Walking late at night, he’d see them dancing over the buildings and the empty streets and sidewalks.
Though Brangwynne was in his college years, he wasn’t a student in fact, some would call him a dropout. He’d been enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University, a first-generation college student, when a mixture of burnout and wanderlust prompted him to take a year off midway through his degree. At first he thought he would take a yearlong trip to Latin America. But he was interested in materials science he liked how it described the world in terms of math and physics. He also loved biology: he loved
Cliff Brangwynne upends tradition to establish a new view of biology
Jerimiah Oetting, for the Office of the Dean for Research
Jan. 25, 2021 9 a.m.
Clifford Brangwynne, the June K. Wu ’92 Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and inaugural director of the Princeton Bioengineering Initiative, sees similarities between living cells and salad dressing, in which oil and vinegar separate according to the laws of physics. The idea has caught on, and now many scientists are exploring how such physical processes can drive the formation of the cell’s structures and play key roles in cellular division and gene expression.
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