1943: Erwin Schrodinger discusses that genetic material most likely resembles an “aperiodic crystal” [175]

Art Piece: Conical Shape. Crystal of Said Hippuric Acid Compound, Carl Struwe, 1927 [21]

Paper: What did Erwin mean? The physics of information from the materials genomics of aperiodic crystals and water to molecular information catalysts and life [192]

Erwin Schrodinger was not really a chemist — rather, he was a prolific theoretical physicist who contributed to ideas such as the wave theory [198] of matter and to quantum mechanics [152], eventually sharing the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with the British physicist P.A.M. Dirac [140]. This is all to say that Schrodinger was not a chemist or a molecular biologist, although he was still curious about the structure of genetic material. No doubt using his vast knowledge as a physicist to inform his speculation, in 1943 he gave talks at UK universities about [175] how “physics could shed light on the puzzling ability of living organisms to maintain molecular order and organization in the face of what seemed to be the randomizing forces of nature.” Moreover, Schrodinger’s book, What is Life? discussed this even more, with him even introducing this idea of an “aperiodic crystal” being the structure for genetic material. Many were inspired [177] by this, including Crick and Watson, who were attempting to get started on their own research into elucidating the structure of what would eventually be known as DNA. This was a paradigm shift in the sense that it not only showed the interdisciplinary nature of science as a whole — here we have a physicist commenting on a premiere molecular and structural biology question of the era — but it also showed the heating up of the race to identify genetic material and its subsequent structure. Notably, the artwork above [21], which depicts “Crystal of Said Hippuric Acid Compound” as a “Conical Shape,” is relevant to the “aperiodic crystal” comment made by Schrodinger. His speculation of this aperiodic crystal ended up being somewhat correct (DNA is antiparallel). The scientific paper above [192] from the Royal Society also discusses more in-depth Schrodinger’s words — the paper talks about how physics had an interdisciplinary relationship with biology, and how this physics helped inform some biological thought of the time, representing a paradigm shift in how we interpreted and understood the world.