Billions of years ago, simple organic molecules drifted across Earth's primordial landscape ' nothing more than basic chemical compounds. But as natural forces shaped the planet over hundreds of millions of years, these molecules began to interact and bond in increasingly complex ways. Along the way, something spectacular emerged: life. 'Life is, to some degree, magical,' says computational biologist Sergei Kotelnikov. Simple organic compounds congregate into polymers, which assemble into living cells and ultimately organisms ' the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. 'You can write formulas on how a molecule behaves,' he says, referring to the world of quantum mechanics. 'But yet somehow, a few orders of magnitude above, on a bigger scale, it gives rise to such a mystery.' Kotelnikov builds models to analyze and predict the structure of these biomolecules, particularly proteins, the fundamental building blocks of every organism. This year, he joined MIT as part of the...
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