The experiment, featured on the cover of the leading weekly science journal Cell of October 30, shows that cells use chance to survive uncertainty. “God does not play dice,” said Einstein to explain that chance does not intervene in nature. However, researcher Jordi García Ojalvo, from the Campus of the UPC in Terrassa, has carried out an experiment, featured on the cover of the leading weekly international journal Cell of October 30 that shows that this is not the case for living organisms. The experiment is the first to succeed in creating a synthetic gene circuit that functions in the same manner as a natural live stem cell. Why do living beings choose to function a certain way? Why do cells base their operation on certain gene circuits and not others? These questions are among the central issues of contemporary science; we need to know the answers in order to understand how living beings work and how cell imbalances cause all kinds of diseases, from cancer to autoimmune diseases. Researcher Jordi García Ojalvo, from the Campus of the UPC in Terrassa, has faced these issues by designing the first ever synthetic gene circuit that works in the same way as an in vivo natural circuit, and he has compared the two.
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