biophysics, discipline concerned with the application of the principles and methods of physics and the other physical sciences to the solution of biological problems. The relatively recent emergence of biophysics as a scientific discipline may be attributed, in particular, to the spectacular success of biophysical tools in unravelling the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the fundamental hereditary material, and in establishing the precisely detailed structure of proteins such as hemoglobin in order that the position of each atom may be known. Biophysics and the intimately related subject molecular biology now are firmly established as cornerstones of modern biology.
The origin of biophysics antedates the division of natural sciences into separate disciplines. Bioluminescence must be considered among the most ancient objects of biophysical exploration, because the emission of light by living organisms has long stimulated the curiosity of natural philosophers. Perhaps the first scientific investigation of animal luminescence was that of Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century German Jesuit priest, who devoted two chapters of his book Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae to bioluminescence. In the midst of his more scientific observations, Kircher found time to expose as a fallacy the notion that an extract made from fireflies could be used to light houses.
The relation between electricity and biology became a subject of speculation in the 17th century and one of intense exploration in the 18th and 19th. Sir Isaac Newton in the Principia (1687) wrote of “a certain most subtle spirit which pervades and lies hid in all gross bodies,” and that “all sensation is excited, and the members of animal bodies move at the command of the will, namely, by the vibrations of this spirit, mutually propagated along the solid filaments of the nerves, from the outward organs of sense to the brain, and from the brain into the muscles.” Man’s fascination with animal electricity is illustrated in a letter written by John Walsh in 1773 to the American inventor and statesman Benjamin Franklin; Walsh wrote the details of his discovery of the electrical nature of the discharge from the torpedo or electric ray:
I am concerned that other engagements have prevented me from giving to the Royal Society, before their recess, a complete account of my experiments on the electricity of the torpedo; a subject not only serious in itself, but opening a large field of interesting inquiry, both to the electrician in his walk of physics, and to all who consider, particularly or generally, the animal oeconomy.
Typical of the unity of science that then prevailed were the advances sometimes made either by professors of physics who were interested in biological phenomena or professors of anatomy, a subject that at that time included physiology. Thus Abbé Giovanni Beccaria, professor of physics in Turin and Italy’s leading student of electricity in the mid-18th century, carried out experiments on the electrical stimulation of muscles. Albrecht von Haller, professor of anatomy and surgery at Göttingen, discussed “the nervous fluid” and conjectured as to whether “electrical matter” and “animal spirits” were the same. In 1786 Luigi Galvani, a physician in Bologna, made the crucial experiment that helped end this controversy. Galvani supposedly was performing experiments with a machine in the company of friends, when, by chance, one member of the party idly probed with a knife the nerves of the thigh of a skinned frog to be used for soup. As the muscles of the frog leg suddenly and unexpectedly contracted, Galvani’s wife noted that a spark had been produced by the electrical machine and “fancied that there was an agreement in point of time.” Although Galvani’s own account of the occurrence differed somewhat in detail from the preceding, it is certain that the experiment was repeated and verified, setting the stage for a long controversy between the advocates of Galvani’s view that current generated by an animal can cause contraction and those of Alessandro Volta, who claimed that the frog leg served only as a detector of minute differences in electrical potential external to it. The Galvani partisans performed an experiment in which no external sources of electricity were present, thus proving that current generated by an animal could cause the muscle contraction. But it was also possible to cause contraction by contact with metals; Volta performed such investigations, and they culminated in his invention of the electrical battery, which was so important that it overshadowed Galvani’s research. As a result, the study of electrical potential in animals disappeared from scientific consideration until 1827.
Because for many years the frog leg was the most sensitive detector of differences in electrical potential, final acceptance of the view that currents can be generated by living tissues had to await the construction of galvanometers sensitive enough to measure the minute currents generated in muscles and the small potential differences across nerve membranes. Galvanometers were built by the great German 19th-century electrophysiologist Du Bois-Reymond, professor of physiology in Berlin. His investigations of muscular current and electrical potential of nerves depended upon a galvanometer of his own devising that required 3.17 miles (5.10 kilometres) of wire wound in 24,000 turns. Research in this subject, called neurophysiology, grew in stature with increased understanding of both electrical phenomena and cellular physiology; it served as one point of origin for biophysics.
Biophysics also grew out of investigations on diffusion gradients and osmotic pressure—two forces responsible for the passive flow of matter in living organisms. Osmotic pressure, the pressure that develops in a solution separated from a solvent by a membrane permeable only to solvent, was first described by Abbé J.A. Nollet, who became professor of experimental physics at the College of Navarre. The semipermeable membranes required to produce the fluid flow that characterizes osmotic phenomena initially came from biological sources; French scientist René Dutrochet wrote in 1828, “it appears from these new studies that the endosmotic and exosmotic phenomena, which I discovered, belong to a new class of physical phenomena, whose powerful intervention in the vital phenomenon is no longer doubtful.” Following the first quantitative measurements by the botanist W.F.P. Pfeffer, the fundamental laws governing diffusion were enunciated by Adolf Fick, who in 1856 published what is probably the first biophysics text, Die medizinische Physik (“Medical Physics”). Fick developed the laws of diffusion not from experiment but by analogy with the laws governing the flow of heat; subsequent laboratory experiments proved the analogy to be quantitatively exact.
Physical and chemical investigation coalesced in physical chemistry, a subject that began to develop with the emergence of the Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie in 1887, a journal founded by Dutch chemist Jacobus van’t Hoff and German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald. The first volume contains contributions from the most noted physical chemists of the time, including van’t Hoff, Ostwald, François Raoult, and Svante Arrhenius. They were concerned with reactions in solution, a central topic in biology because the interior milieu of all living cells is aqueous, and the chemical reactions that sustain life take place in water. The scientific interests of van’t Hoff in particular transcended the boundaries between disciplines. He stressed the importance of the laws of osmosis, which he had clearly delineated, to the economy of all living processes.
Biophysics matured in the 20th century. British biophysicist A.V. Hill described the modern biophysicist in these terms:
Biological phenomena, like many others, show aspects and relations susceptible of physical analysis and interpretation. It is by the choice of problems and by the intellectual processes with which they are formulated and attacked, more than by the particular techniques employed, that a subject can be most clearly defined. There are people to whom physical intuitions come naturally, who can state a problem in physical terms, who can recognize physical relations when they turn up, who can express results in physical terms. These intellectual qualities, more than any special facility with physical instruments and methods, are essential to the make-up of a biophysicist. Equally essential, however, are the corresponding qualities, intuitions, and experience of the biologist. A physicist who cannot develop the biological approach, who has no curiosity about vital processes and functions, who is not willing to spend time in learning the habits of living things, who regards biology simply as a branch of physics has no important future in biophysics. (From Science, Dec. 21, 1956.)
Most biophysical research has been carried out by physicists with an interest in biology; therefore, there must be a way by which scientists educated in physics and physical chemistry can find their way into biology and become familiar with problems that may be open to a physical interpretation. Although classically oriented biology departments often offer positions to biophysicists, they are not substitutes for centres in which biophysical research is of central importance.
The biophysicist possesses the ability to separate biological problems into segments that are amenable to exact physical interpretation and to formulate hypotheses that can be tested by experiment. The primary tool of the biophysicist is an attitude of mind. To this might be added the ability to use complex physical theory to study natural objects—for example, that involved in the X-ray diffraction techniques used to determine the structure of large molecules such as proteins. The biophysicist usually recognizes the utility of new physical tools—e.g., nuclear magnetic resonance and electron spin resonance—in the study of specific problems in biology. But he may also, through previous experience in building specialized equipment to solve physical problems, not have to rely on commercially built instruments.
The development of instruments for biological purposes is an important aspect of a new area—applied biophysics. Biomedical instrumentation is probably most widely used in hospitals. Applied biophysics is important in the field of therapeutic radiology, in which the measurement of dose is critical to treatment, and in diagnostic radiology, particularly with techniques involving isotope localization and whole body scanning to aid in tumour diagnosis. As aids in diagnosis and patient care, computers are of increasing importance. Automation of the chemical analyses routinely carried out in hospitals will soon be a reality. The opportunities for the applications of biophysics seem limitless because the lengthy delay between the development of a research instrument and its application means that many scientific instruments based on physical principles already known will be shown to have important potential for medicine.