We’re only a few hours away from the start of Darwin/Chicago 2009, 2+ days of the world’s leading evolutionary biologists discussing the past and future of the field. Come back to this space tonight at 6:00 pm Central time for live-blog coverage of the opening event at Rockefeller Chapel, and keep coming back all day Friday and Saturday for frequent updates from the conference.

Before things get into full swing, I wanted to play armchair Linnaeus and organize the conference’s 30-some talks into a few major themes. So much is packed into Friday and Saturday, with two simultaneous programs covering “biological sciences” and “history and philosophy,” I won’t be able to see everything, but the list also contains what I’m hoping to prioritize in order to get at least a representative sample of the event.

Evolution Goes to Church

Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, the looming gothic structure on the southeast side of campus where convocations and communion services are held, has been the site of Darwin discussion before - as mentioned yesterday, Sir Julian Huxley gave a speech predicting the end of religion at the 1959 conference. Thursday night’s trio of speakers both follows that agnostic tradition and nicely previews the main threads of the more tightly-packed Friday and Saturday schedules.

Addressing the renewed vigor of the evolution vs. religion debate, Ronald Numbers of the University of Wisconsin will recap the historic path of these conflicts, emphasizing that the “young earth” element of today’s creationists is a relatively new development. Harvard’s Marc Hauser, meanwhile, will pull the rug out from under one of the main creationist arguments - that morality could not have developed under natural selection and must have been given to humans by a supernatural power. But lest you think evolutionary biologists are too distracted by the external debate to do the hard work in their own field, legendary geneticist Richard Lewontin will open the night’s proceedings talking about the challenges of directly determining how genes contribute to an organism’s fitness.

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The shortened "Philadelphia chromosome" seen in certain leukemias (picture from nature.com)

The big science news of the day was the announcement of the Lasker Awards, informally thought of as the American version of the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine. This year’s clinical medical research award went to a trio of researchers from Oregon Health & Science University, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and drug company Novartis, but you could just as easily say it was awarded to a drug: the cancer treatment Gleevec. And Gleevec’s roots stretch back to the campus of the University of Chicago and a very familiar face on this blog: Janet Rowley.

This year, Rowley has already received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Gruber Genetics Prize and stood at President Obama’s shoulder as he repealed federal limitations on stem cell research. Oh, and she’s already won the Lasker Award herself, in 1998. So it’s okay that she’s not mentioned among today’s winners.

As with most stories of scientific discovery moving from the laboratory bench to the pharmacy, it’s simplistic to pin the achievement on one, three, or even ten people. The path to Gleevec’s discovery go back beyond Rowley to the 1950’s when Peter Nowell and David Hungerford - working at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia - found an odd, shortened chromosome in patients with a form of cancer called chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). They called that stubby piece of DNA, appropriately enough, the Philadelphia chromosome.

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I sat down yesterday with Robert Richards, author of “The Meaning of Evolution,” to talk about Darwin’s cultural influences and his place in history. Richards gave a very nice explanation of how deeply Darwin was influenced by John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

When [Darwin] was on The Beagle, he carried Milton’s “Paradise Lost” with him everywhere. He read the poem incessantly. And of course it’s the story of death and suffering - man’s fall. But man’s fall is a necessary prerequisite for the coming of the savior, and the production of life more abundantly, a new kind of life. And if you read those last paragraphs [in "The Origin of Species"], it looks as though Darwin is trying to justify suffering and death. How do you do it? Death and suffering are justified because of the production of the higher animals, life more abundantly. A life leading to the production of the highest animal, namely us, with our moral sentiments.

Darwin’s theory has been so successful that we sometimes overlook the extent to which it was a product of his time, and his distinct way of seeing the world. This link to “Paradise Lost” casts the evolutionary process as something tragic, yet containing the seed of great beauty.