Stuart Kauffman

Stuart Alan Kauffman, born in 1939, is an American physician and theoretical biologist best known for studying how order arises in living systems. He took his medical degree at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1968 and, after his internship, turned to developmental genetics, working at the University of Chicago, the National Cancer Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, where he became professor of biochemistry and biophysics. In 1967 and 1969 he used random Boolean networks to propose that cell types are dynamical attractors in gene regulatory networks, and in 1971 he suggested that some developmentally inaccessible attractors might correspond to cancer cell types, pointing toward the idea of cancer differentiation therapy. He also proposed that collectively autocatalytic sets of peptides could explain the origin of molecular reproduction, and his book Origins of Order appeared in 1993. His honours include a MacArthur Fellowship and the Wiener Medal. He is now emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania.