Denis Noble | |
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Born | [1] | 16 November 1936
Nationality | British |
Education | Emanuel School |
Alma mater | University College London (BSc, MA, PhD) |
Spouse | Susan Jennifer Barfield (m. 1965) |
Children | 2 [1] |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | Balliol College, University of Oxford |
Thesis | Ion conductance of cardiac muscle (1961) |
Doctoral advisor | Otto Hutter |
Website |
Denis Noble CBE FRS FMedSci MAE [3] (born 16 November 1936) is a British physiologist and biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is one of the pioneers of systems biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] Noble established The Third Way of Evolution (TWE) project with James A. Shapiro which predicts that the entire framework of the modern synthesis will be replaced. [9]
Noble was educated at Emanuel School and University College London (UCL). [1] [4] In 1958 he began his investigations into the mechanisms of heartbeat. This led to two seminal papers in Nature in 1960 [10] [11] giving the first experimentally-based mathematical simulation of the electrical rhythm of the heart, [12] extensively developed with Richard Tsien in 1975, [13] and with Dario DiFrancesco in 1985. [14] All three articles form the foundations of modern electrophysiology of the heart. The 1985 article was included in 2015 in the Royal Society's 350 year celebration of the publication of Philosophical Transactions. [15]
From this work it became clear that there was not a single oscillator which controlled heartbeat, but rather this was an emergent property of the feedback loops involving the various ion channels. In 1961 he obtained his PhD working under the supervision of Otto Hutter at UCL. [16] [17]
Noble's research focuses on using computer models of biological organs and organ systems to interpret function from the molecular level to the whole organism. Together with international collaborators, his team has used supercomputers to create the first virtual organ, the virtual heart. [18] [19]
As secretary-general of the International Union of Physiological Sciences 1993–2001, he played a major role, together with Sir Peter Hunter, in launching the Physiome Project, an international project to use computer simulations to create the quantitative physiological models necessary to interpret the genome, and he was elected president of the IUPS at its world congress in Kyoto in 2009. [20]
Noble is also a philosopher of biology, with many publications in journals and books of philosophy. [21] [22] [23]
His books The Music of Life, Dance to the Tune of Life and Understanding Living Systems challenge the foundations of current biological sciences, question the central dogma, its unidirectional view of information flow, and its imposition of a bottom-up methodology for research in the life sciences [24]
His 2006 book The Music of Life examines some of the basic aspects of systems biology, and is critical of the ideas of genetic determinism and genetic reductionism. He points out that there are many examples of feedback loops and "downward causation" in biology, and that it is not reasonable to privilege one level of understanding over all others. He also explains that genes in fact work in groups and systems, so that the genome is more like a set of organ pipes than a "blueprint for life". His 2016 book Dance to the Tune of Life sets these ideas out in a broad sweep from the general principle of relativity applied to biology, through to the role of purpose in evolution and to the relativity of epistemology.[ citation needed ]
He contrasts Dawkins's famous statement in The Selfish Gene ("Now they [genes] swarm ... safe inside gigantic lumbering robots ... they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence") with an alternative view: "Now they [genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence". He then suggests that there is no empirical difference between these statements, and says that they differ in "metaphor" and "sociological or polemical viewpoint". [25]
He argues that "the paradigms for genetic causality in biological systems are seriously confused" and that "The metaphors that served us well during the molecular biological phase of recent decades have limited or even misleading impacts in the multilevel world of systems biology. New paradigms are needed if we are to succeed in unravelling multifactorial genetic causation at higher levels of physiological function and so to explain the phenomena that genetics was originally about." [26]
Noble has called for an extended evolutionary synthesis, and more controversially a replacement for the modern synthesis known as The Third Way of Evolution (TWE). [9] [27] [28]
He has argued that from research in epigenetics, acquired characteristics can be inherited and in contrast to the modern synthesis, genetic change is "far from random" and not always gradual. He has also claimed that the central dogma of molecular biology has been broken as an "embodiment of the Weismann Barrier", [29] and a new synthesis will integrate research from physiology with evolutionary biology. [30] [31] [32] [33] [34]
Noble and James A. Shapiro established The Third Way of Evolution (TWE) project in 2014. The TWE which is also known as the "Integrated Synthesis" shares many similarities with the extended evolutionary synthesis but is more radical in its claims. [9] The TWE consists of a group of researchers who provide a "Third Way" alternative to creationism and the modern synthesis. The TWE predicts that the modern synthesis will be replaced with an entirely new evolutionary framework. Similar to the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES), advocates cite examples of developmental bias, genetic assimilation, niche construction, non-genetic inheritance, phenotypic plasticity and other evolutionary processes. [9] Shapiro's natural genetic engineering, a process described to account for novelty created in biological evolution is also important for the TWE. [33] [34] [35] The difference between the extended synthesis and the TWE is that the latter calls for an entire replacement of the modern synthesis rather than an extension. [9]
In 2022, the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival at Hay-on-Wye featured Noble and Richard Dawkins in a "conversation" on evolution. [36] In 2024 he was featured in Forbes with a video and associated article. He has now (2024) published more than 50 articles and books on evolutionary biology. THETHIRDWAYOFEVOLUTION has now edited 8 special issues of Journals or Book Series, comprising over 100 articles outlining the paradigm shift now developing.
In 2023, evolutionary biologist Erik Svensson commented that "to date, there are few leading evolutionary biologists who have openly embraced the TWE" and it is unlikely that an entire replacement of the modern synthesis will occur as there has been little visibility of such a forthcoming paradigm shift during the past decade. [9]
Noble has proposed Ten Principles of Systems Biology: [37] [38]
Noble has published over 700 articles in academic journals, [2] [19] including Nature, [10] [11] [48] [49] [50] [51] Science, [52] [53] PNAS, [54] Journal of Physiology, [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] Progress in Biophysics & Molecular Biology; [60] Many articles in national press. He is the author or editor of many books, including:
His major invited lectures include the Darwin Lecture for the British Association in 1966, [61] the Nahum Lecture at Yale in 1977 and the Ueda lecture at Tokyo University in 1985 and 1990. He was President of the Medical Section of the British Science Association 1991–92. Many further invited lectures during his election as Secretary-General (1993-2001) and President (2009-2017) of IUPS.
In 1979 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. His nomination for the Royal Society reads:
Distinguished for the discovery of slowly activated potassium currents in the heart and a quantitative analysis of their role in controlling repolarization and pacemaker activity; the discovery of the ionic mechanisms by which adrenaline increases heart rate. He has shown that therapeutic levels of cardiac glycosides may increase, rather than decrease, potassium gradients in the heart, and has published an analytical treatment of membrane excitation theory and cable theory that provides a modern basis for the concepts of safety factor, liminal length, excitation time constants and the phenomenon of repetitive firing. [3]
He was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1988 and an Honorary Fellow in 1994, an Honorary Member of the American Physiological Society in 1996 and of the Physiological Society of Japan in 1998. In 1989 he was elected a Member of the Academia Europaea. In 1998, he also became a founding Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. [62] In 1998 he was awarded a CBE. [63] In 2021 he was elected a Fellow of the IUPS Academy. In 2022 he was elected a Fellow of The Linnean Society (FLS)
He has honorary doctorates from the University of Sheffield (2004), [64] the Université de Bordeaux (2005) and the University of Warwick (2008). [65]
He is an Honorary Foreign Member of the Académie Royale de Médecine de Belgique (1993), [66] of the Istituto Lombardo Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, and received the Pavlov Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2004). In 2022 he was elected Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and was also awarded the Lomonosov Gold Medal. [67]
Noble was born in London in 1936 to working-class tailors, George and Ethel Noble. "George Noble". The family lost its home in London when a high explosive bomb, probably intended for Clapham Junction, destroyed several houses in nearby Lavender Sweep. "Lavender Sweep High Explosive bomb". As a teenager, he was trained as a magician by a stage performer, Tommy Dee, who may have been a model for the famous TV magician, Tommy Cooper.[ citation needed ] He plays classical guitar and sings Occitan troubadour and folk songs (Oxford Trobadors [68] ). In addition to English, he has lectured in French on YouTube, Italian on YouTube, Performance with Nadau & Peiraguda Occitan, [69] [70] Japanese and Korean. [71]
The modern synthesis was the early 20th-century synthesis of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on heredity into a joint mathematical framework. Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. The synthesis combined the ideas of natural selection, Mendelian genetics, and population genetics. It also related the broad-scale macroevolution seen by palaeontologists to the small-scale microevolution of local populations.
Sir Alan Lloyd Hodgkin was an English physiologist and biophysicist who shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Huxley and John Eccles.
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. In a population, the genetic variations affect the phenotypes of an organism. These changes in the phenotypes will be an advantage to some organisms, which will then be passed on to their offspring. Some examples of evolution in species over many generations are the peppered moth and flightless birds. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biology emerged through what Julian Huxley called the modern synthesis of understanding, from previously unrelated fields of biological research, such as genetics and ecology, systematics, and paleontology.
Rodolfo Llinás Riascos is a Colombian and American neuroscientist. He is currently the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine. Llinás has published over 800 scientific articles.
Genetic assimilation is a process described by Conrad H. Waddington by which a phenotype originally produced in response to an environmental condition, such as exposure to a teratogen, later becomes genetically encoded via artificial selection or natural selection. Despite superficial appearances, this does not require the (Lamarckian) inheritance of acquired characters, although epigenetic inheritance could potentially influence the result. Waddington stated that genetic assimilation overcomes the barrier to selection imposed by what he called canalization of developmental pathways; he supposed that the organism's genetics evolved to ensure that development proceeded in a certain way regardless of normal environmental variations.
Sodium channel protein type 5 subunit alpha, also known as NaV1.5 is an integral membrane protein and tetrodotoxin-resistant voltage-gated sodium channel subunit. NaV1.5 is found primarily in cardiac muscle, where it mediates the fast influx of Na+-ions (INa) across the cell membrane, resulting in the fast depolarization phase of the cardiac action potential. As such, it plays a major role in impulse propagation through the heart. A vast number of cardiac diseases is associated with mutations in NaV1.5 (see paragraph genetics). SCN5A is the gene that encodes the cardiac sodium channel NaV1.5.
The sodium-calcium exchanger (often denoted Na+/Ca2+ exchanger, exchange protein, or NCX) is an antiporter membrane protein that removes calcium from cells. It uses the energy that is stored in the electrochemical gradient of sodium (Na+) by allowing Na+ to flow down its gradient across the plasma membrane in exchange for the countertransport of calcium ions (Ca2+). A single calcium ion is exported for the import of three sodium ions. The exchanger exists in many different cell types and animal species. The NCX is considered one of the most important cellular mechanisms for removing Ca2+.
The pacemaker current is an electric current in the heart that flows through the HCN channel or pacemaker channel. Such channels are important parts of the electrical conduction system of the heart and form a component of the natural pacemaker.
Evolutionary physiology is the study of the biological evolution of physiological structures and processes; that is, the manner in which the functional characteristics of organisms have responded to natural selection or sexual selection or changed by random genetic drift across multiple generations during the history of a population or species. It is a sub-discipline of both physiology and evolutionary biology. Practitioners in the field come from a variety of backgrounds, including physiology, evolutionary biology, ecology, and genetics.
James Alan Shapiro is an American biologist, an expert in bacterial genetics and a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Chicago.
Gerd B. Müller is an Austrian biologist who is emeritus professor at the University of Vienna where he was the head of the Department of Theoretical Biology in the Center for Organismal Systems Biology. His research interests focus on vertebrate limb development, evolutionary novelties, evo-devo theory, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. He is also concerned with the development of 3D based imaging tools in developmental biology.
Platon Hryhorovych Kostiuk was a Soviet and Ukrainian physiologist, neurobiologist, electrophysiologist, and biophysicist. He was a member (academician) of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Ukraine and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was also a director of the Bogomoletz Institute of Physiology and the International Center of Molecular Physiology NAS of Ukraine; chair of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Kyiv branch, vice-president of the NAS of Ukraine, and chairman of the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR.
The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) consists of a set of theoretical concepts argued to be more comprehensive than the earlier modern synthesis of evolutionary biology that took place between 1918 and 1942. The extended evolutionary synthesis was called for in the 1950s by C. H. Waddington, argued for on the basis of punctuated equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1980s, and was reconceptualized in 2007 by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
David Alfred Eisner, FRCP (Hon), FMedSci, is British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiac Physiology at the University of Manchester and editor-in-chief of The Journal of General Physiology (JGP).
In biology, reciprocal causation arises when developing organisms are both products of evolution as well as causes of evolution. Formally, reciprocal causation exists when process A is a cause of process B and, subsequently, process B is a cause of process A, with this feedback potentially repeated. Some researchers, particularly advocates of the extended evolutionary synthesis, promote the view that causation in biological systems is inherently reciprocal.
In biology, constructive development refers to the hypothesis that organisms shape their own developmental trajectory by constantly responding to, and causing, changes in both their internal state and their external environment. Constructive development can be contrasted with programmed development, the hypothesis that organisms develop according to a genetic program or blueprint. The constructivist perspective is found in philosophy, most notably developmental systems theory, and in the biological and social sciences, including developmental psychobiology and key themes of the extended evolutionary synthesis. Constructive development may be important to evolution because it enables organisms to produce functional phenotypes in response to genetic or environmental perturbation, and thereby contributes to adaptation and diversification.
Denis Aristide Baylor was an American neurobiologist. He was professor emeritus of neurobiology at Stanford University. He is known for his research on nerve cells in the retina of the eye. He developed a widely-used method for observing the electrical activity of single rod and cone photoreceptor cells and described how they encode light stimuli. Baylor’s work has been recognized by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society of London.
David James Paterson MAE Hon FRSNZ is a New Zealand-born British physiologist and academic. He is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford at the University of Oxford. He is also the Head of the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics at Oxford, and immediate Past President of The Physiological Society of the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. Paterson is best known for his work in cardiac neurobiology, linking the nervous system to heart rhythm, which was featured in the 2012 BBC Four documentary Heart v Mind: What Makes Us Human?, and associated interviews on RNZ National Science programme Heart v Mind. In 2018 he co-authored with Neil Herring the text book Levick's Introduction to Cardiovascular Physiology, 6th edition.
Dario DiFrancesco is a Professor Emeritus (Physiology) at the University of Milano. In 1979, he and collaborators discovered the so-called "funny" current in cardiac pacemaker cells, a new mechanism involved in the generation of cardiac spontaneous activity and autonomic regulation of heart rate. That initiated a new field of research in the heart and brain, where hyperpolarization-activated, cyclic nucleotide-gated (HCN) channels, the molecular components of "funny" channels cloned in the late 90's, are today known to play fundamental roles in health and disease. Clinically relevant exploitation of the properties of "funny" channels has developed a channel blocker with specific heart rate-slowing action, ivabradine, marketed for the therapy of coronary artery disease, heart failure and the symptomatic treatment of chronic stable angina.
Peter Kohl is a German scientist specializing in integrative cardiac research. He studies heterocellular electrophysiological interactions in cardiac tissue, myocardial structure-function relationships using 'wet' and 'dry' lab models, and mechano-electrical autoregulation of the heart.
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