Why do all living systems eventually lose their ability to stay alive? And what defines the edge of viability — the point at which a living cell or organism can no longer restart life's essential dynamics?
In this talk, I will describe how my lab studies these questions by slowing down or suspending the lives of cells and organisms — through environmental perturbations like extreme cooling or starvation, or through developmental changes such as cellular differentiation. Using yeast and mouse embryonic stem cells, we probe how biological time — defined by the pace, directionality, and duration of life's non-equilibrium dynamics — breaks down.
I will summarize three studies from our lab that uncover fundamental constraints on gene expression, self-replication, and viability. For example, in our ongoing work, we demonstrate — for the first time to our knowledge — that cells that have lost viability can regain it. This surprising result challenges the long-held assumption that losing viability is synonymous with death. Instead, we show that a reversible non-viable state exists — a state from which life's dynamics can spontaneously restart.
These studies highlight conceptual links between physics, biology, and medicine. I will conclude by discussing future directions, including our current efforts to understand slowed life in multicellular systems like C. elegans, and longer-term plans to investigate dormant cancer cells — with the goal of uncovering quantitative principles that govern life's limits.