How do we define life? David Lynn, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry and Biology, studies the molecular structures of living systems. When molecules make mistakes during self-assembly, or 'mis-fold' and replicate incorrectly, these misfires can inform our understanding of the biomolecular chemical processes that we understand as life.

Lynn's research group at Emory focuses on biomolecular chemistry, molecular evolution, and synthetic biology. Members within the lab explore molecular self-assembly and want to understand to what extent molecular events can be changed or reinvented and still be called a "living system." The findings from their investigations have the potential to enhance medical understandings of diseases and their treatments. Working with Emory's Neurodegenerative Disease Center, for example, Lynn and his colleagues have studied the mis-folded proteins and peptides that produce Alzheimer's disease. Within the next three to five years, Lynn forecasts, "we will know a lot more about the disease and how to treat it."

In the process, we might even come to know more about the origins of life itself. As scientists study what goes wrong in diseased molecules, they also gain knowledge of what goes right in healthy ones. Lynn studies these broader evolutionary functions, or what may be called the development of life. "I'm interested in the rules that underlie the healthy functioning of all living systems," he says. Identifying those rules poses a challenge as there is nothing with which to compare them. This hasn't stopped him from trying: his laboratory aspires to "harness" natural evolutionary processes with new molecular structures and functions. Put another way, they are working to create self-sustainable living systems that follow new rules of assembly. "Is it possible to recreate the central elements that we think of as existence?" he asks. This isn't playing 'creator,' Lynn explains. It's discovering how to reconstruct existing evolutionary functions. And it's doing so in ways that illuminate the astonishing diversity and breadth of living systems on the planet - and possibly beyond it.

Since joining the Emory faculty in 2000, Lynn has worked with faculty, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates in collaborative scientific endeavors. He refers to this part of his work as "cross-fertilization" and the most stimulating and exciting part of the academic enterprise. On a larger scale, he is an active member of FAME (Fundamental and Applied Molecular Evolution), a joint project between Emory and Georgia Tech. FAME researchers comprise the largest cluster of scientists in the world working on molecular evolution.

In 2002, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) selected Lynn as one of 20 inaugural Hughes professors, an award aimed at bringing scientific research into the undergraduate classroom. That award made possible the creation of a freshman seminar at Emory that Lynn calls ORDER: "On Recent Discoveries by Emory Researchers." ORDER brings together graduate students in the natural and social sciences with Emory freshmen to engage the scientific method from diverse perspectives and with a broad array of research questions.

ORDER honors and celebrates graduate student discoveries in scientific research. It provides graduate students with opportunities to translate their findings to an educated lay audience. And for undergraduates, it serves as a mechanism to discover their own 'driving questions' that will guide their studies in coming years. The class has proven so successful that it has been picked up by a joint funding initiative between Emory College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences as a part of INSPIRE, the Interdisciplinary Science Program for Integrating Research into Education.

A new ORDER seminar will focus on science and religion. Lynn wants his students to explore "free will" from scientific, theological, and humanistic perspectives. He maintains that this kind of conversation across the disciplines remains vital to the university. "The humanities help scientists formulate these questions about who we are, and vice versa," Lynn says. He believes Emory's strategic plan can help foster such conversations. "If we can do it right," he says, or if we can make these conversations self-sustaining, "then we can make a very powerful statement about what a university is going to be in the twenty-first century."