When Leeuwenhoek looked down the first microscope in the 17th century, he essentially saw blobs. When Darwin looked out from the Beagle in the 19th century, he saw blobs too. But when Max Perutz solved the high-resolution structure of haemoglobin in the middle of the last century, he was seeing atoms. Watson and Crick also showed atoms in their structure of DNA in 1953. Biology had become chemistry, and the age of molecular biology began.
Now the genomes of thousands of organisms have been sequenced, and the structures of thousands of proteins. It is possible to deduce the structures of proteins using AI. AlphaFold won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2024. But this isn’t really chemistry now – it’s mathematics, statistics, and computation.
Biology has now become mathematics and data science. But most biologists were not drawn into the field by their love of numbers. Happily, UNSW has always been a place that has loved numbers. We have Australia’s largest Engineering Faculty, and it is supported by other excellent Schools, including Mathematics & Statistics and Computer Science & Engineering. But beyond organisational operations individual researcher and student support is necessary, and the Stats Central was an inspired and essential initiative. UNSW is well placed as the age of digital biology and precision medicine unfolds.
Professor Merlin Crossley AM is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic Quality) at UNSW Sydney and a Professor of Molecular Biology. His research has focused on gene regulation and the molecular mechanisms underlying diseases such as thalassaemia. He is an enthusiastic science communicator, and amongst other contributions, is Chair of the Editorial Boards of The Conversation and UNSW Press. He was a Rhodes Scholar, a recipient of the NSW Premier’s Award for Medical Biological Science, and in 2021 a species of iridescent squid was named in his honour – Iridoteuthis merlini – Merlin’s butterfly bobtail squid!
