The Friends of Charles Darwin

Sir Paul M. Nurse, co-recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, spoke to members of the Cornell community at the 13th Annual Ef Racker Lecture in Biology and Medicine… As part of the lecture series, Nurse gave a public talk entitled "The Great Ideas of Biology" on Thursday evening. Nurse began his lecture by reflecting that biology is a subject that "deals with details" and that the field of biology does not consist of "many great ideas and grand theories" when compared to physics or chemistry. Nevertheless, he proceeded to take the audience through a historical tour of what he felt were some of the great ideas of biology. Nurse talked about evolution by natural selection, an idea which he noted was the "best known to [the] public and also the most notorious. He called the theory of Natural Selection, proven by Charles Darwin in the 1800s, the "most beautiful idea of biology, and one that I think is the greatest."