“Lipids at the border of madness” – Ole G Mouritsen

I knew that a link would uncover itself between the various ramblings here and the actual work I do. This will have to be brief and poorly-referenced because I’m running late late late.

I study lots of things in my daily incarnation of Applied Mathematician, but one of them is “the emerging science of lipidomics”, as reads the subtitle of a rather natty book called “Life – as a matter of fat” by Prof Ole G Mouritsen. Lipid molecules are fatty molecules. Lipids self-assemble (a link with emergence discussed elsewhere), under the action of a mysterious “soft” entropic force known as the hydrophobic effect, into biological membranes. Their structure and function is not coded for anywhere in your genome, and yet they are arguably the most important structure in your body, regulating or controlling almost every process that occurs within it.

Around 60% of the dry weight of your brain is lipids. In a subsection of the book, with the title of this post, Mouritsen presents the controversial theory of David Horrobin who suggests that what makes human brains so good at giving rise to intelligence is . . . lipids. And we get our lipids from the food we eat. This brings me to another great post from Bob over at Heroes not Zombies.