Henry Quastler

Henry Quastler (November 11, 1908 – July 4, 1963) was an Austrian medical doctor and radiologist who became a pioneer in the field of information theory applied to biology after emigrating to America. His work with Sidney Dancoff led to the publication of what is now commonly called Dancoff's Law.

Life Quastler spent his early career in Vienna as a doctor. He received his medical degree in Vienna in 1932, focusing on histology and radiology. He met his wife, Gertrude Quastler, a milliner, when she came to him for treatment for tuberculosis. They married in 1933. The couple moved to Albania when King Zog asked for Quastler to train up radiologists. While there he also worked on malaria. Quastler's malaria expertise earned him a place on the International Health Board. As World War II approached in 1939, the couple left Albania and traveled to America. Within a year Quastler was working as a radiologist at New Rochelle Hospital in New York. In 1942, the Quastlers relocated to Urbana, Illinois, where Henry was employed as chief radiologist at Carle Hospital Clinic.

In 1949, Quastler gave up his medical practice to concentrate on science. Heinz von Foerster, who knew Quastler well, said that he became even more interested in radiation after the invention of the atomic bomb, which he considered "a horrifying human catastrophe". Foerster recalled Quastler pondering: "[Quastler asked] 'Can I now, as a working person, find out what damage has been done by the radiation of atomic bombs?'—that was his research question. Thus he started to conduct experiments on radiation damage in living organisms." ... Henry Quastler learned the basic concepts and formalisms of information theory with a speed that was almost unbelievable. And why? Because he needed this instrument urgently." He edited another collection of essays, Information Theory in Psychology: Problems and Methods, in 1956. That same year he helped to organize the Symposium on Information Theory in Biology in Gatlinburg, Tennessee which two years later resulted in an eponymous book.

Despite his best efforts, his wife's tuberculosis slowly worsened. A deterioration in his wife's health led Quastler to take a job at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, where he continued to work on both radiation and information biology. Heinz von Foerster said of Quastler that he was "an exceptionally conscientious, ethically and morally conscious human being."

The Emergence of Biological Organization In 1964 Quastler's book The Emergence of Biological Organization was published posthumously. In 2002, Harold J. Morowitz described it as a "remarkably prescient book" which is "surprisingly contemporary in outlook". In it Quastler pioneers a theory of emergence, developing model of "a series of emergences from probionts to prokaryotes".

Forty-five years after Quastler's 1964 proposal, Lincoln and Joyce described a cross-catalytic system that involves two ribozymes (RNA enzymes) that catalyze each other's synthesis from a total of four component substrates. This synthesis occurred in the absence of protein and could provide the basis for an artificial genetic system.

Publications