Biology and Physics
In Inventing Science Education for the New Millennium Paul Hurd may see biology emerging into a dominance once held by physics, but the opinion of several speakers at the centennial meeting of the American Physical Society in Atlanta, 20-26 March 1999, was more prone to the concept of a partnership.
"Saying that a century of physics is giving way to a century of biology is an oversimplification," suggested National Science Foundation Director Rita Colwell, herself a microbiologist, in a panel on science policy on 21 March. She pointed out how much physics and biology have in common and how much more shared territory they are staking out every day. For one thing, she said, neither field is modest: one deals with the birth of life, the other with the birth of the universe. She quoted naturalist John Muir: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." She iterated a long list of physicists who have made contributions to biology, and she noted that imaging techniques developed by and for physics also aid in medicine. Colwell therefore saw a convergence between physics and biology, but she also saw a need to establish a common language -- a "scientific esperanto" -- so that scientists in the two disciplines could communicate with each other better.
Much the same was said by National Institutes of Health Director Harold Varmus in his talk on "The Impact of Physics and Biology" the following day. "Discoveries in biology and medicine depend on progress in many fields of science," most notably physics and chemistry, he began. He cited the treatment of biological forms ad physical objects, as when William Harvey treated blood flow as a problem in fluid dynamics. More recent examples are the medical use of X rays, radioactive tracers, and more recently of positron emission tomography (PET), ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and chromosomal identification.
But physicists should not be regarded merely as technological servants, Varmus continued. He cited Max DelbrŸck (who sought a "radical physical explanation for the behavior of living cells") and other physicists who have taken a genuine interest in solving biological problems and often brought quantitative approaches that were otherwise lacking. This was particularly true, he said, of Leo Szilard. And Warren Weaver, a mathematical physicist, coined the term "molecular biology" because he foresaw the molecular level as the basis for solving biological problems.
Contemporary biology is on the verge of demanding a more quantitative approach to its problem solving, Varmus went on, citing three areas of biology requiring skills of physicists: 1) understanding single macromolecules, 2) applying complex data sets to gene expression in the Human Genome Project, and 3) understanding how cells receive and respond to external signals. The increasing interdisciplinarity between physics and biology, Varmus added, also raises questions about the training of research scientists to work on these interdisciplinary problems.
Much the same was said by former Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology Mary Good on Tuesday, 22 March. "The 21st century may be the century for biology but biology cannot progress without the assistance of physics and chemistry," she proclaimed in her talk on "Physics and Technology."
The support physics provides biology was illustrated two days later at one of the special Centennial Symposia -- on "Energy Landscapes in Physics." The central topic was protein folding, which figures prominently in the convesion from normal prion proteins to their infectious form. The final speaker on the program was Stanley Prusiner, awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the mechanism by which prions cause diseases. Lay readers can learn about his work from his article, "The Prion Diseases," in the January 1995 issue of Scientific American.
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