About the meeting series

It all started with a simple question: Why do healthy human red blood cells live for 120 days?

A question whose answer seemed like a mouse click away turned into a journey through comparative physiology and empirical laws that connect biological parameters across species.

Motivated by this question, during a research visit to the Alpenzoo Innsbruck, Austria in 2022, Peter Kotanko and David Jörg concocted the idea of a privately organised interdisciplinary symposium with experts from fields as diverse as veterinary sciences, human medicine, biology, physics, and even economics. The symposium should cover fundamental biological topics in evolution, ecology, developmental biology and ageing and connect them to questions of human and animal health, thus fostering cross-fertilisation between basic and applied sciences and enabling new and possibly ‘exotic’ collaborations.

The first meeting “Allometry and Scaling in Biology” took place where the idea emerged—at the Alpenzoo in 2023. Even for an interdisciplinary meeting, the breadth of topics was enormous, from statistical physics of DNA methylation to ‘food as medicine’ and back.

Encouraged by the success of the initial meeting, a second meeting (organised by Peter Kotanko, Peter Stenvinkel and David Jörg) ensued in Stockholm, Sweden in 2024, still expanding the range of subjects and experts, reflected in the new name Patterns Across Scales in Living Systems, which is now also the name for the symposium series.

The next meeting is planned to take place in Vienna, Austria in 2025.

The Patterns Across Scales in Living Systems symposia are an endeavour driven by passion for research. They are privately organised and are funded by private donations, meeting grants by not-for-profit organisations and are supported by the respective hosting institution. They are not associated with or funded by for-profit organisations.

Permanent organisers

David Jörg

Frankfurt am Main
Germany

Peter Stenvinkel

Stockholm
Sweden