life inspired

'I first read the paper by Fritz Lipmann titled "Metabolic generation and utilization of phosphate bond energy" (4). This historic paper introduced the notion of the "high-energy phosphate bond," symbolized by Lipmann's famous "squiggle," together with the accompanying key concepts of group potential and group transfer. This paper, even though published 3 years before Schrödinger's celebrated book, was most probably unknown to him. It clarified for the first time the second property singled out by Schrödinger in his definition of life: its ability to extract "negative entropy," better known to chemists as "free energy," from the environment and convert it into chemical and other forms of work.' Full letter @ Science

Labels: entropy; life; information