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Whitehead Fellow Paul Wiggins comes to biology via physics. Although he began his academic career studying string theory (a cornerstone of modern physics), Wiggins decided in graduate school to switch his focus from the cosmos to the elegant universe of the cell. He paints a stunning portrait of this realm where proteins zip along microtubule highways and biological motors harness energy from their surroundings in a 43-minute presentation. [ 220 kbps QuickTime 56 kbps ]
Selected Achievements
John McMullen Dean's Merit Scholarship, Cornell University (1995-1996)
Cucindal Award, Applied and Engineering Physics, Cornell University (1999)
Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award, Astronomical Society of New York (2000)
Where is biology going in the post-genomic era? "The human genome is really no more than a parts list," explains Wiggins. "The most exciting problem in biology-figuring out how the cell actually works-hasn't gone away!" Wiggins' work focuses on how some of the most simple molecular machines of the cell work. Wiggins hopes to use a synthesis of the standard biological and biochemical approaches with the experimental and theoretical tool kit of physics to build quantitative models of biological processes and phenomena.
Recently, Wiggins and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology and University of Pennsylvania have proposed that the forces required to bend DNA may have been overestimated for decades. They demonstrated that many of the classic DNA mechanics experiments are not nearly as informative as scientists had assumed. This is significant because DNA bending occurs constantly in cells (DNA is typically bent every time a gene makes RNA). Only recently have these and other experiments began to explore DNA bending in a way that is relevant for describing cellular functions.
At Whitehead, Wiggins will be exploring the geometry of membranes and the structure of organelles such as the mitochondria, which handle cellular energy production. The illustrations of mitochondria structure in biology textbooks over the last 40 years are wrong, says Wiggins, as we now know thanks to new microscopy techniques. "But what gives rise to the intricate membrane structures we observe? For me, that is a very aesthetic question." Wiggins and collaborators are combining membrane mechanics and observed membrane structures to gain insight into cellular architecture.
Wiggins received his PhD in 2005 from the California Institute of Technology, where he worked in the lab of Rob Phillips. His thesis topic was the statistical mechanics of biomolecules.
Selected Publications
P. Wiggins, P. Nelson. A generalized theory of semiflexible polymers. (submitted to Phys Rev E, cond-mat/0508155).
P. Wiggins & R. Phillips. Membrane-protein interactions in mechanosensitive channels. Biophys. J., 88 (2): 880-902 (2005).
P. Wiggins, R. Phillips & P. Nelson. Exact theory of kinkable elastic polymers. (Phys Rev E 013501, cond- mat/0409003).
P. Wiggins & R. Phillips. Analytic models for mechanotransduction: Gating a mechanosensitive channel, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 101: 4071-4076 (2004).
P. Wiggins & D. Lai. Tidal Interactions Between a Fluid Star and a Kerr Black Hole in Circular Orbit, Astrophys. J. 532:530 (2000).
R.Q. Erkamp, P. Wiggins, A.R. Skovoroda, S.Y. Emelianov, & M. O'Donnell. Measuring the Elastic Modulus of Small Tissue Samples, Ultrasonic Imaging, 20:17-28 (1998). | 