Erwin Schrödinger was one of the foremost physicists of our time, responsible for the theory of atomic motion known as wave mechanics or quantum mechanics. He is important to biology because of a slim volume he published in 1944 called What Is Life" In this book, he set out to apply the laws of quantum mechanics to the molecules of living cells. From his rigorous analysis, he deduced that genetic mutations must take place because of a change in a molecule. He also first described the chromosome fiber as a message written in code. Schrödinger's little book laid the groundwork for future breakthroughs in genetics. He was the first physicist to apply his field to biology, and thus was also the precursor of much recent work in biophysics.
Schrödinger was the only child of a well-to-do Viennese family. His father had studied chemistry and retained a life-long interest in botany, though his profession was running a linoleum business. Schrödinger was a brilliant student from his earliest years. He entered the University of Vienna in 1906, and graduated with a degree in physics. He taught at various German-language universities, eventually arriving at the University of Zurich in 1922. In Zurich Schrödinger applied himself to working out his theory of wave mechanics. Albert Einstein and others had inferred that electrons have wave properties as well as particle properties. Schrödinger came up with a mathematical description of the wave properties within an atom. In 1933 he won the Nobel Prize in physics (shared with Paul Dirac) for his work on wave mechanics.
Schrödinger taught at the University of Berlin, and then at Oxford for a time, but returned to Vienna in 1936, apparently homesick for his native land. Hitler's army invaded Austria just two years later. Schrödinger was soon forced to flee for alleged anti-German activities, and he ended up in Dublin at the newly established Institute for Advanced Studies. It was there that Schrödinger gave a series of public lectures in 1943 that became his book What Is Life" He took up questions of biology, going back to interests he had picked up from his father and abandoned since his undergraduate days.
Schrödinger begins his book by explaining why atoms are so small, or why living organisms are so large by comparison. A small number of atoms behaves erratically, always subject to random heat motion. Only when a large number of atoms occur is randomness overcome, and physicists can predict what might happen to the group of atoms in a given situation. Living organisms, which thrive on orderliness, must therefore be made up of large amounts of atoms, in order to overcome the unpredictability of individual atomic behavior. Schrödinger next discussed genetic theory as it was known up to that time. He deduced that mutations--abrupt changes in an organism's offspring--must take place at a very small level, involving only a few million atoms. He introduced the idea that the chromosome fiber was actually a series of very small repeating units, like the dots and dashes of Morse code. What Is Life" begins with mathematics, statistics and genetics, and ends in mysticism. Schrödinger was ultimately unable to explain what life is any more completely than anyone else. But he showed that there might be unknown physical laws that applied to living things. This virtually opened the field of molecular biology. Both Francis Crick and James D. Watson, discoverers of the DNA code, were influenced by Schrödinger's book. Watson, in fact, claimed that reading What Is Life" as an undergraduate was what made him decide to study genetics and find out the secret of the gene.
Schrödinger returned to Vienna after the war. His later works were philosophical in nature, devoted to questions of consciousness and life after death. He retired from teaching in 1958, and he died in 1961.
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