Algorithmic view of historicity and separation of scales in biology

A Science publications is one of the best ways to launch your career, especially if it is based on your undergraduate work, part of which you carried out with makeshift equipment in your dorm! That is the story of Thomas M.S. Chang, who in 1956 started experiments (partially carried out in his residence room in McGill’s Douglas Hall) that lead to the creation of the first artificial cell (Chang, 1964). This was — in the words of the 1989 New Scientists — an “elegantly simple and intellectually ambitious” idea that “has grown into a dynamic field of biomedical research and development.” A field that promises to connect biology and computer science by physically realizing John von Neumann’s dream of a self-replication machine.