Max-Born-Institut Berlin (MBI)

Fig. 41
Analysis of end-plate potentials
recorded with an intracellular
electrode (Fatt P. & Katz B.,
(1951). Journal of Physiology,
115, 320-370).
22
Max Born • Gustav Born
colleague of mine growled: “Churchill smoked all his life and lived to ninety-six, and my little
brother never smoked and died at three months”. But the connection between lung cancer and
cigarette smoking had been firmly established in 1950 by Sir Richard Doll (Doll and Bradford
Hill, 1950) [36, 37]. Fifty years later, understanding of carcinogenesis has increased enormously
(Peto et al, 2000) [38, 39]; but there is no way of predicting the occurrence of lung cancer
in any given individual, other than to say that smoking increases the chances by a measurable
amount. Thus in analogy to the deterministic probability waves in physics, in biology causality
is in overall command of individual probabilistic events.
Nevertheless the situations are of course quite different. Quantum physics deals with inferred
particles of which it is in principle impossible to determine position and momentum simultaneously
with equal accuracy. In biology we are dealing with identifiable molecular structures; and
in principle the proposition remains open that even multiple causes of events might become
individually determinable. In practice, the indeterminacy arises from the enormous complexity
of interacting causative factors, which makes the contribution of each impossible to predict.
My friend and co-worker Professor Peter Richardson [40], a physicist as well as a physiologist,
puts this as follows: “Indeterminism in physics has an analogy in biology. This is usually referred
to as biological variability which is meant to include genetic variations. With increasing