2024-04-12 23:05:37
More than a century after the first Physics and Chemistry Council, the Solvay Institutes are innovating. This week, thirty scientists are meeting in Brussels for a very first Biology Council.
“I love science and I expect the progress of humanity from it.” At the end of the 19th century, the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay proclaimed his faith in science. In 1911, the first Physics Council, initiated by him, was created in Brussels. A high-level meeting which welcomed the biggest names of the time and (future) Nobel Prize winners, such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Max Planck or even Maurice de Broglie, Heindrik Lorentz.
A century later, the Physics and Chemistry Councils welcome a new initiative from the Solvay Institutes (ULB and VUB). The first Biology Council will be held for three days in Brussels, from April 18 to 20. With ambitions that match those of his illustrious predecessors.
“Biology is on the cusp of a truly new revolution, as quantum physics was at the 1911 Council.”
Jean-Marie Solvay
President of the Solvay Institutes
“It was following the 2017 Physics Council, dedicated to biophysics, that we realized participants’ enthusiasm for biology“, explains Jean-Marie Solvay, president of the Institutes. “The theoretical physicist Lars Brink, among others, was particularly enthusiastic. The director of the Institutes, Professor Marc Henneaux, also. We were immediately convinced. Biology is at the dawn of a truly new revolution, as was quantum physics at the 1911 Council. We therefore decided to launch a new type of Solvay Council, a Council dedicated to biology.”
It took several years to bring the project to fruition. “We prepared it a lot,” concedes physicist Marc Henneaux, Francqui Prize in 2001, and director of the Solvay Institutes. “And I think it will be a scientific success. I am even convinced of it!”
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Complete a three-year cycle
The question of the best time to organize this new meeting was quickly answered. When to launch this new Council? Those of physics and chemistry are each organized every three years. In this cycle, there was therefore an “off” year. Biology naturally comes to take its place.
“We also had to find the funding essential for its organization and related activities, such as the establishment of chairs allowing biologists to be invited,” continues Professor Henneaux. “The Solvay family was present from the outset, as well as the UCB firm, and other sponsors“.
Finally, it was above all necessary to identify the person best suited to chair the scientific committee for this new meeting. It is the president who gives the scientific impulses, who determines the program, who draws up the list of specialists to be invited.
Thomas Lecuit, professor at the Collège de France and director of the Turing Center for Living Systems (Institute of Developmental Biology of Marseille), agreed to take on this challenge. With a few other scientists from diverse backgrounds, members of his committee, the choice of the theme for this first Biology Council was decided: “The organisation and dynamics of biological computation“.
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“The aim of this meeting is to advance our understanding of the modes of transmission of information and its processing by biological systems”
Thomas Lecuit
Chairman of the scientific committee of the Biology Council
Communication within life
“My field of research focuses on development, and in particular morphogenesis,” explains Thomas Lecuit. “I study the mechanical processes involved in changes in the form of living things, the forces at work. In particular what governs the evolution of all the cells which form an embryo or an organ. Work which is by nature interdisciplinary and which in this sense touches as much on biology as on physics.
And computation in this context? The answer to this question takes the form of questions which will be at the heart of the work of the Council’s guests. How do cells communicate with each other?? How do they process information from other cells? Besides, what is information in biology? And we’re not talking about DNA or neuroscience here.
“The purpose of this meeting is to advance our understanding of how information is transmitted and its treatment by biological systems”, summarizes Professor Lecuit. “Understanding morphogenesis already occupied the mathematician Alan Turingin 1954. Work since clarified by biologists, such as Lewis Wolpert and Francis Crick in the 1970s.
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“I hope, with this first Biology Council, to be a place for collective and interdisciplinary reflection and exchange.”
Thomas Lecuit
Chairman of the scientific committee of the Biology Council
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This explains why the guests of this Council come from multiple disciplines. There will be physicists, biologists, statisticians, chemists…”Specialists who may not yet be used to working together but who could, in a collegial manner, advance our fundamental knowledge in this field“, estimates Marc Henneaux.
The format of the Solvay Councils is conducive to this type of exchange. We are indeed far, here, from the conduct of a classic scientific conference.
“I wanted to do something else. An ambitious, daring meeting, but also, obviously, interesting, useful and realistic,” explains Professor Lecuit.
“First by inviting a small number of participants. There will only be around thirty of us in total. Our work will reflect what is currently happening in biology. Then, I hope, with this first Biology Council, that we do not come to talk about our latest scientific results, as we do at many conferences, but rather that it is a place for reflection and collective and interdisciplinary exchangearound a central theme in biology”.
“The participants in this meeting will thus alternate periods of plenary sessions and discussions by subgroups“, he explains. “The idea is to go back and forth. Isolating yourself in subgroups for a few hours allows you to explore the questions in more depth. To then bring out and pass on to all the participants a certain number of points of view, “discoveries”, clarifications, ideas to share.”
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Marina Solvay addresses Solvay Councils in her book “Quantum Fantasies”, published by Saint-Simon in 2020.
“We have always favored very upstream research over applications during the Solvay Councils., in physics as in chemistry”, adds Professor Henneaux. “It will be the same thing this week with the Biology Council. If you are too close to applications, you are not going to change the world,” he emphasizes.
“Ernest Solvay’s scientific commitment was based on the idea that general well-being can only result from a unified development of the physical, natural and social sciences which, according to him, are called to merge into one “universal science”recalls Marina Solvay, president of the Solvay Institutes archives.
“As early as 1893, he said: I have glimpsed in the new paths of science directions that I have followed, problems which in my eyes form only one. It is first of all a problem of general physics, the constitution of matter in time and space; then a problem of physiology, the mechanism of life from its most humble manifestations to the phenomena of thought.”
With the organization of the first Biology Council, its vision will finally address this dimension of life. Ernest’s spirit has not finished blowing over Brussels.
A public event on Sunday in Brussels
Solvay Advice is aimed at specialists. However, the organizers systematically double them as a free event open to all. It will be this year Flagey, Sunday April 21.
Two presentations and a round table are on the program. Anthony Hymandirector of the Max Planck Institute in Dresden, will discuss the social life of the cell, i.e. the physical and chemical mechanisms allowing the transmission of information at the cellular level.
Stephanie Palmer, professor at the University of Chicago, will begin with a presentation entitled “Seeing what’s coming”, focused on the anticipation mechanisms of our brain. The presentations will be followed by a round table in which the Professors will participate. Thomas Lecuit (president of the first Biology Council), Cédric Blanpain (ULB), Adrienne Fairhall (University of Washington), Anthony Hyman (Institut Max-Planck), Stephanie Palmer (University of Chicago), Aleksandra Walczak (ENS, France) and Eric Wieschaus (Nobel Prize in Medicine 1995, Princeton University). The presentations are in English. Simultaneous translation into French and Dutch will be available. Registration for the event is done via the website www.solvayinstitutes.be.
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