Plenary-04 : John Jungck Prize

Fred Adler

Director, School Of Biological Sciences

University of Utah, USA

Abstract:

We like to imagine that our students are cheerfully unaware of the ocean of educational bureaucracy that surrounds their peaceful island of learning. Despite the hassles of registering and paying for classes, students are supposed to run head-on into the dreaded bureaucracy only when they join the so-called real world. What is all that bureaucracy doing anyway? Is it a superstructure created by self-serving and parasitic bureaucrats? Strangely, perhaps the most elaborate bureaucracy we know of lies within each of us, whether student, professor, or paper-pushing Vice President. This bureaucracy is the cell. The vast majority of genes and proteins within cells are effectively bureaucrats, regulating each other rather than building things. Regulation requires communication through a complex network of intracellular signaling, which in turn extends beyond the cells as the chatter among cells that regulates tissues. Why is the most remarkable self-organized system in the known universe so bureaucratic? I will present models of how bureaucracy provides robustness to self-organized systems and of how these complicated systems can be corrupted. In particular, we have come to see cancer as corruption of the system of signaling that maintains tissue integrity in the face of uncertainty and disturbance, and reflect that back to society to think about how corruption, a violation of public trust, can be modeled and taught to our students to prepare them for the challenges of modern citizenship.