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Dr. Mae-Wan Ho is a noted and controversial holistic scientist and a critic of genetic engineering. Her career spans more than 30 years in research and teaching in biochemistry, evolution, molecular genetics, and biophysics. She is the Co-Founder and Director of the UK-based Institute of Science in Society. She is former head of the Bio-Electrodynamics laboratory at the Open University in Milton Keynes, England. She is Editor of the radical science magazine, Science in Society. She also is a Scientific Advisor to the Third World Network.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho obtained her Bachelor of Science degree in Biology in 1964, and her Ph. D. in Biochemistry in 1967 from Hong Kong University, and was Postdoctoral Fellow in Biochemical Genetics at the University of California in San Diego from 1968-1972. During that time, she won a competitive Fellowship at the US National Genetics Foundation, which took her to the University of London in the United Kingdom, where she became Senior Research Fellow at Queen Elizabeth College.
At the Open University, she was a Lecturer in Genetics from 1976-2000 and a Reader in Biology from 1985-2000. She currently remains Visiting Reader in Biology at the Open University, and is also a Visiting Professor of Biophysics at Catania University in Sicily.
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho has authored or co-authored a number of publications, including 10 books, such as The Rainbow and the Worm, the Physics of Organisms (1993, 1998), Genetic Engineering Dream or Nightmare? (1998, 1999), and Living with the Fluid Genome (2003).
Dr Ho has argued that living creatures do not obey the second law of thermodynamics. Her line of reasoning can be illustrated with the following quotations:
"Energy flows in together with materials, and waste products are exported as well as the spent energy that goes to make up entropy. And that is how living systems can, in principle, escape from the second law of thermodynamics." "... there is always coherent energy available in the system, which can be readily shared throughout the system, from local to global and vice versa, from global to local. That is why, in principle, we can have energy at will, whenever and wherever it is needed. Stored coherent energy sets the organism free from the immediate constraints of both the first and the second law of thermodynamics."
"... there need be no entropy generated in adiabatic processes - which occur frequently in living systems...".
"As distinct from heat engines, which require a constant energy supply in order to do work, organisms are able to work without a constant energy supply, and moreover, can mobilize energy *at will*, whenever and wherever required, and in a perfectly coordinated way. ... In this article, I outline a theory of the organism as a dynamically and energetically closed domain of cyclic non-dissipative processes coupled to irreversible dissipative processes. This effectively frees the organism from thermodynamic constraints ...".
Footnotes
- Ho, MW. Is There a Purpose in Nature?. A workshop paper at Carolinum (Charles University), Prague, March 22-25, 1998
- Ho, MW. What is (Schrödinger's) Negentropy? Modern Trends in BioThermoKinetics 3, 50-61, 1994.
- Ho, MW. Towards a theory of the organism. Integr Physiol Behav Sci. 1997 32:343-63.