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be expressed in ways which do not take these appearances into account…and can be specialized at will…” DNA sequences are, as MIT molecular biologist, Eric Lander observed, nothing more than an elementary “…list of parts…” In fact, since about 1% of the nucleotides are relevant to functional genes, one might say that the important members of this list of parts are distributed very thinly among many more apparently unimportant ones. The next frontier will certainly involve an understanding of the dynamics of the interactions among elemental parts and in more abstract laws about molecular biological relations; a focus on the dynamics, not the structural parts, that regulate and control their expression.

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I made a pilgrimage to spend eighteen months within Rene’ Thom’s penumbra, living among mathematicians in his “ashram” in Bures sur Y’vette, France. Thom was one of the founders of the Institute des Hautes D’Etudes, IHES, Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies, created to stanch the flow of high-level scientific talent away from France after the Second World War. It is in Bures sur Y’vette, deep in a green forested valley, 50 or so miles South of Paris, in a building packed with small, thin walled, big windows-on-the-woods offices. Each office contained a single hard chair, an old office desk, two walls of blackboards and a box of white only chalk. The use of colored chalk was felt to be without mathematical rigor because its use substitutes colors as dimensional descriptors for more demanding abstract and formal representations. Color was cheating. Meditation in this ashram was practiced by staring, pacing, scribbling, and humming, mumbling, belching and farting through the Institute’s thin office walls. The building, though almost completely occupied, was otherwise silent. The Institute was populated by such world-class mathematicians and theoretical physicists that once inside that building, I felt so intimidated that I almost never spoke above a whisper. Listening to excellent William Thurston’s casual use of a tiled bathroom floor to motivate a unique partition of a topological space, I was attacked by the awe of an early morning visit to an almost empty Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris or standing in front of Michelangelo’s radiant marble statue of Mary and Jesus the Infant in the Vatican.

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