Robustness in Biological Processes: Can We Quantify It? And a few related issues far from equilibrium

Ping Ao
UW Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Physics

Here are briefs of two extremes of my recent work.

1) Emergence of Thermodynamics from Darwinian Dynamics, P. Ao. To appears in Proceedings of Keenan Symposium, Meeting the Entropy Challenge, October 4-5, 2007. MIT, Boston, USA. AIP Conference Proceedings Series. http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0712/0712.3768v1.pdf. In this short note I outlne a framework to unify nonequilibrium processes with equilibrium ones. Some of the recent active topics, such as stochastic dynamical equalities, appear naturally, and, can be extended further.

2) Cancer as Robust Intrinsic State of Endogenous Molecular-Cellular Network Shaped by Evolution. P. Ao, D. Galas, L. Hood, X.-M. Zhu, Medical Hypotheses (2007) (in press). http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0709/0709.0552.pdf . Here we reason bioloigcally that the robustness can not only be quantified, it can also be used to address some of important issues in medicine, to understand cancer. Stay in tune for our quantitative results based on stochastic anaylysis.