in Psychology: Problems and Methods, in 1956. That same year he helped to organize the Symposium on Information Theory in Biology in Gatlinburg, Tennessee which two years later resulted in an eponymous book. Despite his best efforts, his wife's tuberculosis slowly worsened. 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. When his wife died in 1963, Quastler was devastated. He took an overdose of pills, laid down beside her and held her hand until he died. Richard Diebenkorn later said, "Neither my wife nor I can think of a couple we encountered more indivisible." Heinz von Foerster said of Quastler that he was "an exceptionally conscientious, ethically and morally conscious human being." Work with Dancoff In Foerster's words Quastler and Dancoff attempted to answer the following problem: According to Lily E. Kay, Quastler and Dancoff created "the first technical application of the Weiner-Shannon theory in genetics." Quastler and Dancoff proposed that the replication errors inevitable in biological reproduction must be held in check by a statistical process that functioned as a "checking device" within the gene. Quastler compared this to the system of "checks and balances" in the American constitution. The proposition known as "Dancoff's Law" emerged from this work. A non-mathematical statement of this law is, "the greatest growth occurs when the greatest number of mistakes are made consistent with survival". The Emergence of Biological Organization In 1964 Quastler's book The Emergence of Biological Organization was published posthumously. In 2002, Harold J. Morowitz described it as a "remarkably prescient book" which is "surprisingly contemporary in outlook". In it Quastler pioneers a theory of emergence, developing model of "a series of emergences from probionts to prokaryotes". 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. However, he noted that polymerization of a single-stranded polymer from mononucleotides is slow, and its hydrolysis is fast; therefore in a closed system consisting only of mononucleotides and their single-stranded polymers, only a small fraction of the available molecules will be polymerized. However, a single-stranded polymer