Introduction

Abstract

The cell doctrine stating that all living systems are built out of one or more cells was formulated by M. J. Schleiden and T. Schwann in 1838–1839 (Swanson 1964; Bechtel 2010). Since then an enormous amount of experimental data has been accumulating in the literature and on the World Wide Web, pre- and post-Google, on the structure and function of the cell, based on which many authoritative books have been written, one of the most recent publications being The Molecular Biology of the Cell, Fifth Edition, by Alberts and his colleagues (2008). Other publications include “Computational Cell Biology” (Fall et al. 2002) and Mechanics of the Cell (Boal 2002), which are highly mathematical and computer model based and deal with rather specialized subfields within molecular cell biology. To the best of my knowledge (as of June 2011), there has been no general book published that deals with the molecular theory of the living cell as a whole, except, as mentioned in the Preface, the books by Schrödinger (1998), Crick (1966), and Rizzotti (1996). The present book may be viewed as the twenty-first-century version of What Is Life? that has been updated taking into account the biological knowledge that has accumulated since 1944 when What Is Life? was published. The molecular theory of life formulated by Schrödinger and that described in this book are compared in Sects. 16.2 and 16.6 and Chap. 21.