Biological Physics Comes of Age | American Physical Society

Physics and biology were not always separate disciplines. In the 18th century, controversy about “animal electricity” proved foundational for the understanding of electricity more generally. In the 19th century, explorations of vision and hearing intermingled with the emerging understanding of optics and acoustics. In the 20th century, the chasm between physics and biology grew wider, but there were spectacular bridges. Most famously, the work that launched our modern view of life — structures of DNA and proteins, theories of base pairing and the genetic code — was done primarily in physics departments. The revolutionary successes of (re-)connecting physics with biology in the mid-20th century completely changed how we think about life, and even changed how biologists’ work is organized. What emerged first was called molecular biology, and over the course of a generation the ideas and methods of molecular biology — grounded in physics — touched almost every part of the biological scien

Physics and biology were not always separate disciplines. In the 18th century, controversy about “animal electricity” proved foundational for the understanding of electricity more generally. In the 19th century, explorations of vision and hearing intermingled with the emerging understanding of optics and acoustics. In the 20th century, the chasm between physics and biology grew wider, but there were spectacular bridges. Most famously, the work that launched our modern view of life — structures of DNA and proteins, theories of base pairing and the genetic code — was done primarily in physics de