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From page 3... ... The committee's general and specific recommendations in response to challenges in education, funding, and the human dimensions of science can be found in Part III, and are summarized in Appendix B The biological physics community is developing new experimental methods that expand our ability to explore the living world, and new theories that expand the conceptual framework of physics. Read the entire page →
From page 5... ... Biological physics, or the physics of living systems, brings this physicist's style of inquiry to bear on the beautiful and complex phenomena of life. Read the entire page →
From page 6... ... New science is fueled by new young people entering the field, and it matters how they are educated. Integration of biological physics into the physics curriculum, at all levels, can be synergistic with a broader modernization of physics teaching and the nurturing of a more quantitative biol ogy (Chapter 8) Read the entire page →
From page 7... ... In this first attempt to survey biological physics as a part of physics, the committee has taken a broad view: Biological physics is the effort to understand the phenomena of life in ways that parallel the physicists' understanding of the inanimate world, prizing the search for new physics that does not have an obvious analog outside the living world. Even though physicists ask different questions, the biological physics community often builds on foundations laid by generations of biologists. Read the entire page →
From page 8... ... This flow of ideas and methods across disciplinary boundaries speaks to the centrality of biological physics in the current scientific landscape. A Brief History For centuries, the phenomena of life were seen as fundamental challenges to human understanding of the physical world. Read the entire page →
From page 9... ... Doing Physics in a Biological Context The previous paragraphs outline an optimistic view of history, with parallel developments in physics and biology leading toward the emergence of biological physics as a branch of physics. In fact, this was once a minority point of view. Read the entire page →
From page 10... ... Beyond the electrical currents flowing through single ion channels, or the voltages generated by single cells, new methods make it possible to monitor, simultaneously, the electrical activity of hundreds or even thousands of individual neurons in the brain as an animal executes complex behaviors. Beyond the classic experiments of tracking the behavior of a single bacterium, experiments now monitor thousands of individual cells in a growing bacterial community, or thousands of individual birds in a flock, as they engage in collective behaviors. Read the entire page →
From page 11... ... In focusing on emergence, the goal is to classify and understand behaviors that arise when many of the building blocks interact, in the spirit of condensed matter physics. Each of these approaches to the physics of life has a substantial history, starting well before biological physics was accepted as a part of physics. Read the entire page →
From page 12... ... (B) FIGURE I.1 Determining the structure of DNA was a seminal moment for nascent biological physics, as it captured the attention of the physics community. Read the entire page →
From page 13... ... This is evident on very large scales, as with the ordered yet fluid behavior of birds in a flock, but also on very small scales, as protein structures emerge from interactions among many amino acids. It is an old dream of the physics community that such emergent phenomena in living systems could be described in the language of statistical mechanics. Read the entire page →
From page 14... ... Statistical physics provides a unifying language, connecting phenomena across the full range of scales, identifying new kinds of order, and locating living systems in the phase diagram of possible systems. Searching for What Is Special About Living Systems Biological physics encourages us to view living systems as examples drawn from a much larger class of possible systems. Read the entire page →
From page 15... ... This example connects otherwise arbitrary facts about the living world to basic physical principles, quantitatively, and is based on the idea that evolution can select for structures and mechanisms that come close to the physical limits on their performance at tasks crucial in the life of the organism. Ideas in this spirit now appear more widely, both in the abstract and in detailed partnership with experiment: Amino acid sequences could be selected to minimize the competing interactions that would frustrate protein folding; gene expression levels in bacteria could be tuned to maximize the conversion of nutrients into growth; the dynamics Read the entire page →
From page 16... ... of immunological memory could be selected to optimize the response to the likely time course of antigenic challenges; neural codes could provide efficient representa tion of information in patterns of electrical activity, or efficient storage of memories in patterns of connections between neurons. Even if real organisms do not reach true optima, these theories provide useful idealizations and more precise ideas about what physics problems organisms need to solve in order to survive. Read the entire page →
From page 17... ... One of the central problems in biological physics is to turn qualitative notions of biological function into new and precise physical concepts, as described in Chapter 1. How do living systems represent and process information? Read the entire page →
From page 18... ... Many of the central questions in biological physics are aimed at understanding these emergent phenomena, as described in Chapter 3. How do living systems navigate parameter space? Read the entire page →
From page 19... ... Along the way to realizing this promise, the biological physics community will develop new experimental methods that expand our ability to explore the living world, and new theories that expand the conceptual framework of physics. Success will lead to a redrawing of the intellectual landscape, likely in ways that will surprise us. Read the entire page →
From page 20... ... Although many people have the sense that biological physics is a nascent or minor activity in the physics community, in fact the number of students receiving physics PhDs with a specialization in biological physics has grown, in just 15 years, to a volume comparable to that of well-established subfields (see Figure 8.1 in Chapter 8) Read the entire page →
From page 21... ... Experiments from the biological physics community provide the most compelling measurements of the entropic elasticity of polymers, a problem that appears in almost all statistical physics textbooks. Polymers, membranes, and other materials inspired by biological molecules were at the origins of soft matter physics, while attempts to describe the collective behavior of flocks and swarms provided a foundation for the field of active matter; soft and active matter now are burgeoning fields of physics, independent of their connection to the phenomena of life. Read the entire page →
From page 22... ... . Thinking about the dynamics of these biomolecules has been driven by the theoretical ideas about energy land scapes which emerged from the biological physics community. Read the entire page →
From page 23... ... This report takes a broad view of the biological physics community, recognizing that many exciting developments also could be categorized as biophysics or quantitative biology. This in clusive view is used also in describing the historical development of the field, recognizing that early work by physicists who asked new questions and brought new tools to explore the phe nomena of life should be seen as continuous with the 21st-century version of biological physics. Read the entire page →
From page 24... ... . This has involved a mix of theory and experiment, observing the dynamics of single channels but also building mathematical models that explain how these dynamics shape the computations done by neurons; making it possible to record, simultaneously, the electrical activity of thousands of neurons but also providing theoretical frameworks within which to search for meaningful collective dynamics in these large data sets. Read the entire page →
From page 25... ... SOURCE: Courtesy of Micah Rapp, Simons Electron Microscopy Center, New York Structural Biology Center. Ideas and results from the biological physics community have had extensive impact on health, medicine, and technology more generally (Chapter 7) Read the entire page →
From page 26... ... The ease with which we walk or run through complex environments belies the enormously challenging physics problems that complicate efforts to build robots. There are clear paths from ideas in the biological physics community about the mechanics and neural control of movement to robots that implement a broad range of locomotion strategies, from insect-like hexapods to snake-like limbless robots. Read the entire page →
From page 27... ... It is vital that this unifying culture is transmitted to students in biological physics. Chapter 8 emphasizes that what is needed is not added specialization, but integration: Biological physics needs to be integrated into the core physics curriculum, at all levels. Read the entire page →
From page 28... ... Realizing the promise of biological physics obviously depends on having suf ficient financial support. As explained in Chapter 9, research on the physics of living systems is supported by a surprisingly wide array of federal agencies and private foundations. Read the entire page →
From page 29... ... That discussion concluded:5 We have passed the point at which the interaction between physics and biology can be viewed as "merely" the application of known physics. Rather, the conceptual challenges of the phenomena of life are driving the emergence of a biological physics that is genuinely a subfield of physics. Read the entire page →
From page 30... ... Where the physicist's intel lectual style can seem demanding and inaccessible, taking inspiration from the phenomena of life connects these scientific ambitions to the imagination of a wider audience. Many members of the biological physics community see this as a special path to exciting the public about science more generally, to recruiting and retaining a more diverse community of students, and ultimately to shaping how we think of ourselves as humans. Read the entire page →
From page 31... ... Emergence of a New Field The enormous range of phenomena encountered in living systems -- phenomena that often have no analog or precedent in the inanimate world -- means that the intellectual agenda of biological physics is exceptionally broad, even by the 6 For a brief summary, see National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, "Our Study Process," https://www.nationalacademies.org/about/our-study-process. Read the entire page →
From page 32... ... This representation will take different forms in different institutions, but positioning biological physics as a core compo nent of the physics community reinforces an approach to the beautiful and complex Read the entire page →
From page 33... ... Specific Recommendation: The biological physics community should sup port exploration of the full range of questions being addressed in the field, and assert its identity as a distinct and coherent subfield embedded in the larger physics community. Educating the Next Generation Establishing a new field and stretching the boundaries of well-established disciplines are multigenerational projects. Read the entire page →
From page 34... ... Chapter 8 explores several places in the physics curriculum where the phenomena of life, and the progress of biological physics, can be used to convey core physics principles, not just in the introductory courses but continuing into more advanced undergraduate material on classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics. Conclusion: There is a need to develop, collect, and disseminate resources showing how examples from biological physics can be used to teach core phys ics principles. Read the entire page →
From page 35... ... Twenty years ago, the BIO 2010 report brought attention to the educational challenges that follow from these developments, emphasizing that quantitative measurements and mathematical analyses would play a central role in the future of the biomedical sciences.7 The intervening decades have seen even more rapid progress, in directions that have strong overlap with the interests of the biological physics community. These developments underscore the continued relevance of the message in BIO 2010. Read the entire page →
From page 36... ... Conclusion: The biological physics community has a central role to play in initiatives for multidisciplinary education in quantitative biology, bioengineer ing, and related directions. General Recommendation: University and college administrators should al locate resources to physics departments as part of their growing educational and research initiatives in quantitative biology and biological engineering, acknowledging the central role of biological physics in these fields. Read the entire page →

From page 3...

... The committee's general and specific recommendations in response to challenges in education, funding, and the human dimensions of science can be found in Part III, and are summarized in Appendix B The biological physics community is developing new experimental methods that expand our ability to explore the living world, and new theories that expand the conceptual framework of physics.