Stochastic gene expression (SGE) is involved in an evergrowing number of  aspects of cellular life. It is typically an area of research needing modelization and interdisciplinary collaboration between biologists, bioinformaticians, physicists and mathematicians. SGE  is an important aspect of cellular physiology that has to be integrated into systemic approaches  and as such it is now the object of much attention of the international community. It raises a number of questions regarding its role in organisms, notably in developmental biology and could have profound consequences for biological theories: is it a "noise" that disrupts the operation of the genetic program, does it fits into a vision based on the theories of self-organization, or does it implies a conceptual framework change such as cellular Darwinism ?

It is clear that the intrusion of probability in molecular biology is not straightforward. It calls into question not only the design of deterministic gene expression, but the whole tradition of biology, which has always been deterministic regarding the internal functioning of organisms. As in physics, the question inevitably arises of the status of probability in biology: is it a subjective probability (epistemic), dependent on a lack of complete information upon the studied phenomena and ultimately reducible or is it an objective (ontological) stochasticity dependent on the intrinsic nature of the living process, and thus irreducible?

The emergence of stochastic gene expression therefore raises important questions about its implications not only for biological theories but also about its epistemological status. Furthermore, it causes reluctance among biologists for number of historical reasons that should be understood for being bypassed.

For all those reasons we organized in the center Cavaillès (ENS-Paris) a multidisciplinary conference in French in 2008, entitled "Le Hasard au Coeur de la Cellule”. This conference brought together experimental and theoretical biologists, modelers, epistemologists and philosophers who addressed all those issues. This conference attracted a large audience and was a successful interdisciplinary exchange. The second edition of CHC was organized in Lyon in november 2011 that  gave rise to a special issue of the journal "Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology".

CHC’3 will be the third edition of the conference; it will bring an experimental, theoretical and epistemological dimension for research in this multidisciplinary field and create a unique opportunity for interaction between participants.

Chance at the Heart of the Cell

WHAT?

CHC is a multidisciplinary conference that addresses the questions opened by Stochastic Gene Expression from an experimental, theoretical and epistemological perspective