Henry Quastler (November 11, 1908 – July 4, 1963) was an Austrian physician and radiologist who became a pioneer in the field of information theory applied to biology after emigrating to America.
In 1942, the Quastlers relocated to Urbana, Illinois, where Henry was employed as chief radiologist at Carle Hospital Clinic.
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".
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.
[5] The work is based on lectures given by Quastler during the spring term of 1963, when he was Visiting Professor of Theoretical Biology at Yale University.
In these lectures Quastler argued that the formation of single-stranded polynucleotides was well within the limits of probability of what could have occurred during the pre-biologic period of the Earth.
Such a process is relatively fast and the resulting double-stranded polynucleotide is much more stable than the single single-stranded one since each monomer is bound not only along the sugar phosphate backbone, but also through inter-strand bonding between the bases.
Mutations that influence the folding state of polynucleotides may affect the ratio of association of strands to dissociation and thus the ability to replicate.
These ideas were then developed to speculate on the emergence of genetic information, protein synthesis and other general features of life.
Lily E. Kay says that Quastler's works "are an illuminating example of a well reasoned epistemic quest and a curious disciplinary failure".
Quastler's aspiration to create an information based biology was innovative, but his work was "plagued by problems: outdated data, unwarranted assumptions, some dubious numerology, and, most importantly, an inability to generate an experimental agenda."
[2] Forty-five years after Quastler's 1964 proposal, Lincoln and Joyce[9] described a cross-catalytic system that involves two RNA enzymes (ribosymes) that catalyze each other's synthesis from a total of four component substrates.