An Interactive Annotated World Bibliography of Printed and Digital Works in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences from Circa 2000 BCE to 2022 by Fielding H. Garrison (1870-1935), Leslie T. Morton (1907-2004), and Jeremy M. Norman (1945- ) Traditionally Known as “Garrison-Morton”

15961 entries, 13944 authors and 1935 subjects. Updated: March 22, 2024

BOHR, Niels

1 entries
  • 12060

Light and life. Address delivered at the opening meeting of the International Congress on Light Therapy in Copenhagen 15. August 1932.

Copenhagen: IIe Congrès International de la Lumière, 1932.

This pamphlet predates both the lecture's publication in Danish in Naturens Verden and the English translation published in Nature, both of which were published in 1933. A German translation appeared in Naturwissenschaften in the same year. Niels Bohr's lecture marks his first detailed attempt to apply concepts arising from quantum mechanics (particularly complementarity) to areas outside physics. "Here, for the first time, Bohr raised a question that was to preoccupy him, off and on, until his death: Would it ever be possible to push the analysis of living processes to the limit where they can be described in terms of pure physics and chemistry?" (Pais, p. 441). Bohr's lecture can be looked upon as one of the foundation stones of molecular biology in that it inspired the young physicist Max Delbrück— who was in the audience when Bohr delivered it— to switch from physics to biology "to find out whether indeed there was anything to this point of view" (quoted in Pais, p. 442). In 1935, two years after hearing Bohr's lecture, Delbrück and two other scientists published a paper on genetic mutations caused by x-ray irradiation, in which they concluded that the gene must be a molecule. The ideas expressed in this paper inspired Schrödinger to write his famous What is Life?, a work which in turn motivated Watson, Crick, Wilkins and other scientists to devote their careers to unraveling "the secret of the gene." Delbrück himself became a leader of what was known as the "phage group" of bacterial geneticists; in 1969, he received a share of the Nobel Prize for physiology / medicine for describing the means by which living cells are infected with viruses. "It is fair to say that with Max [Delbrück], Bohr found his most influential philosophical disciple outside the domain of physics, in that through Max, Bohr provided one of the intellectual fountainheads for the development of 20th century biology" (quoted in Pais, p. 442). Pais, Niels Bohr's Times, pp. 411; 441-42. Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation, pp. 32-35.

When I wrote this entry in March 2020 the text of Bohr's Light and life appeared to be most readily available online in the digital facsimile of his Atomic physics and human knowledge (1958) available from the Internet Archive at this link.



Subjects: BIOLOGY › MOLECULAR BIOLOGY