Biology

One of the classic papers in quantitative biology and potentially in biology as a whole. Protein synthesis and DNA replication are two examples of processes where the error rates are minute (10^-4 and 10^-9, respectively). Purely thermodynamic considerations require the right and wrong processes to have enormous energetic differences leading to Arrhenius alterations of the probabilities of complexes forming. Hopfield appeals to an additional, energy consuming, step that is able to lead to dramatic reductions in errors while leaving the relative energetics of the substrates and complexes unchanged.