Harbor-UCLA Pediatrics

Earlier this month, Dr. John Torday, Professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics/Gynecology, spoke at the UCLA Department of Medicine Grand Rounds as part of "Evolutionary Medicine Month." For more details visit the UCLA CTSI.

Evolutionary medicine is an emerging field which combines the disciplines of evolutionary biology, anthropology, zoology and human medicine to create new paradigms for investigating and understanding human disease.

Dr. Torday's talk, "Exploiting Evolutionary Biology to Advance Medicine: Back to the Future," focused on the theme that an individual's health is not merely the absence of disease, but the active maintenance of evolutionarily-acquired and conserved cell–cell molecular communications, the failure of which denotes disease, and the maintenance or restoration of which constitutes health and healing. In particular, Dr. Torday used laboratory data to emphasize how evolutionary mechanisms and concepts can be exploited for the safe and effective prevention and treatment of chronic lung disease.

In addition, Dr. Torday recently co-authored a book entitled "Evolutionary Biology, Cell-Cell Communication and Complex Disease" which incorporates cell biology into evolutionary biology. Rather than focusing on multicellular organisms, the book concentrates on the cell as the smallest unit of biologic structure and function. This is the first time that evolution has been looked at from the cellular mechanistic perspective, making evolution more accessible and relevant to all of biology and medicine.

According to Dr. Torday, "Understanding evolutionary biology is key to integrating biology. Evolutionary-developmental biology provides an opportunity to exploit contemporary cell-molecular developmental biology. This is a logical way to understanding evolution that's been 'trumped' by our zeal to reduce everything in biology to genes. Evolution, like cell biology, is a process, not a thing." The power of this novel approach and the concept of cell-cell communication spans all of biology, from its initial conditions to preventive medicine.