2025 Seitz Lecture: Cliff Brangwynne| 3.26.25

“Living Droplets: A Fluid Paradigm for Intracelluar Organization“
Living cells are often viewed as functioning through a clockwork-like set of interactions among their biomolecular building blocks, like machines on a factory floor. But the processes taking place within cells are vastly more wet and dynamic than many textbooks would have us believe. Over the last dozen years, research combining insights from materials physics and cell biology has ushered in new paradigm for understanding how this chaotic intracellular environment is brought to order, through the collective condensation of disordered of biomolecules into droplets of living information. Intracellular condensates represent viscoelastic states of biomolecular matter, which facilitate dozens of different intracellular processes, and are closely linked to various cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. In this talk, I will discuss some of our early and more recent adventures in this new field, and highlight the challenges and opportunities for the next decade.

The Frederick Seitz Lectureship in the Institute for Biophysical
Dynamics has been generously endowed by Attallah Kappas who
is an alum of the medical school here (MD ‘50) and faculty member
here before moving to Rockefeller in 1967.