More later, just having some fun.
Conversation
9. Upon reflection, I don't really know what cells are _for_. (I know, I know, that may be the wrong framing entirely.) Should I think of them as little factories, taking simple inputs (sugars etc) and pumping out complex proteins? Not sure, exactly.
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10. If you look naively at a lot of diagrams, it often seems the cell wall is a relatively small part of the cell. In yeast, at least, it makes up 10-25% of the dry mass of the cell(!) I don't know the % of the volume, unfortunately.
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11. There's something like 6 orders of magnitude between small-genome life and large-genome life! In terms of linear dimension it's something like the difference between the height of a large ant hill and the height of Mt. Everest.
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12. Related: One thing the book does well is just put in-your-face over and over and over the staggering diversity of life. Protons, electrons, and neutrons are nifty things.
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13. Also related: the book rubs in your face the extent to which the biological world is a repository of extraordinary nanomachines which we humans can go discover. It's just this incredible extant resource of ideas and principles and machinery.
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And we understand so little about it still. Fun to realize, for instance, that we only pretty recently understood the basic structure of the ribosome - the nanomachine that turns messenger RNA into proteins.
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(I know, I know, the broad point here certainly isn't news. Still, the book is fun to read for the onslaught of lovely examples.)
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14. Question: Has anyone understood in detail how Coase's "Nature of the Firm" (and the modern followons) relate to multi-cellular life? Lots of very similar problems...
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