Geoffrey B. West

"Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks... Fascinated by issues of aging and mortality, West applied the rigor of a physicist to the biological question of why we live as long as we do and no longer. The result was astonishing, and changed science, creating a new understanding of energy use and metabolism: West found that despite the riotous diversity in the sizes of mammals, they are all, to a large degree, scaled versions of each other... West's work has been gaming changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work's applicability...and applied...[it] to the business and social world."--

The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

Scale

I love that West introduces the whole field of biology by criticising its disconnect from common — no, universal — concerns. And that maybe all that every biology department and the NIH need, is a little bit of basic math.

Travis Well

Given the poor track record of males in my ancestry, it seemed natural to begin my thinking about biology by learning about aging and mortality. Because these are among the most ubiquitous and fundamental characteristics of life, I naively assumed that almost everything was known about them. But, to my great surprise, I learned that not only was there no accepted general theory of aging and death but the field, such as it was, was relatively small and something of a backwater. […] where does the scale of one hundred years for human life span come from, and what would constitute a quantitative, predictive theory of aging?

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