biophysics
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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.
Historical background
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.
Interdisciplinary work
The biophysical approach is unified by a consideration of biological problems in the light of physical concepts, so that biophysics is, perforce, interdisciplinary. Biophysics may be thought of as the central circle in a two-dimensional array of overlapping circles, which include physics, chemistry, physiology, and general biology. Relations with chemistry are mediated through biochemistry and chemistry; those with physiology, through neurophysiology and sensory physiology. Biology, which may be viewed as a general subject pervading biophysical study, is evolving from a purely descriptive science into a discipline increasingly devoted to understanding the nature of the prime movers of biological events. The evolution of biology in these directions has received great impetus from the biophysical and biochemical discoveries of the 20th century. An understanding of the physical principles governing biological effects is the proper end of biophysics.
Areas of study
The content and methods of biophysics are illustrated by examining several notable contributions to science.
Protein structure
Within two days after the initial publication of Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of X rays in 1895, a surgeon in Scotland used X rays to observe a needle as he extracted it from the palm of an unfortunate seamstress. Although this medical application resulted in the development of radiological diagnosis and treatment of disease by radiation, physical aspects of Röntgen’s discovery also provided the means for elucidating the structure of proteins and other large molecules. The laws governing the diffraction of X rays were discovered by the two Braggs, Sir William and Sir Lawrence, who were father and son. At the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, where Sir Lawrence was professor, J.D. Bernal was studying the use of X-ray diffraction for the determination of the structure of large biological molecules. He had already used X rays to define the size and shape of the tobacco mosaic virus and showed it to have a regular internal structure. At the Cavendish Laboratory the group that formed around Bernal, a man of wide public and scientific interests, included the Nobel Prize winners Max Perutz and John Kendrew, who in 1937 began to use X rays to analyze two proteins fundamental to life, myoglobin and hemoglobin, both of which function in the transport of gases in the blood. Twenty-two years passed before the structures of these proteins were established; the significance of the work is that it provided the basis for an understanding of the mechanism of the action of enzymes and other proteins, an active and fruitful subject of modern investigation.
Deoxyribonucleic acid
Interest in biophysics at the Cavendish Laboratory resulted in another important discovery, the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the genetic material. This achievement by a British biophysicist, Francis H.C. Crick, and by a U.S. biochemist, James Watson, was based on X-ray data obtained by Maurice Wilkins at King’s College, London. When Crick first went to the Cavendish Laboratory for education in biophysics, he worked under Perutz’s direction; when Watson went to the Cavendish, he and Crick began the collaboration that led to the establishment of the structure of DNA, for which Watson, Crick, and Wilkins later were awarded a Nobel Prize.
Much impetus for biophysical investigation following World War II came from the desire of physicists to move away from physics and into biology; this drive was strengthened by the publication in 1944 of Erwin Schrödinger’s book What Is Life? Schrödinger, the Austrian physicist who contributed substantially to the development of wave mechanics, was anxious to determine whether biological events could be accounted for in terms of known laws of physics and chemistry, or whether a full explanation would require the formulation of physical laws not yet known to exist. Because biological reproduction seemed to pose intractable problems, he devoted a chapter of his book to a consideration of the gene. The discussion was based on the model put forward by Max Delbrück, a physicist who had for some years been studying the genetics of viruses that infect bacteria (bacteriophages). Delbrück’s summer course on bacteriophages in 1945 at Cold Spring Harbor in New York set in motion the chain of events that led to understanding the genetic code by which the sequence of the nucleotides in DNA is translated into the sequence of amino acids in a protein. The use of bacteriophage also provided an opportunity for experiments with a primitive living organism that could be studied without anatomic complexities. This aspect of biophysics has become more biochemically oriented as it has developed and is now known as molecular biology; sometimes it is considered a distinct discipline, and other times it is subsumed under the biophysical sciences.
The nerve impulse
Important aspects of biophysics have been derived from physiology, especially in studies involving the conduction of nerve impulses. One important scientific product of World War II—the development of vastly improved electronics—largely resulted from radar devices that had been used primarily for locating aircraft. Another product, the atomic bomb, was constructed by way of nuclear reactors that could, in peace time, provide an abundant supply of radioactive isotopes, which are now of great value not only in biophysical research but also in biochemistry and medicine. These two disparate advances were important to the work of two Nobel Prize winners, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, who showed how the flow of sodium and potassium across the membranes of nerves can be coupled to produce the action potential, a brief electrical event that initiates the action potential, which propagates the nervous signal.
A model of the nerve axon proposed by Hodgkin and Huxley grew from a 19th-century confluence of ideas. Julius Bernstein, an experimental neurophysiologist, used physical chemical theories to develop a membrane theory of nervous conduction; Hodgkin’s initial experiments were designed to test specific predictions of the Bernstein hypothesis. Early in 1938 Hodgkin learned of the important results of a newly developed technique that allowed examination of the time course of nervous conduction. After World War II, Hodgkin, joined by Huxley, again took up the research. They presented their explanation of the mechanism of nervous conduction in five scientific papers between October 1951 and March 1952.
Biological membranes
The availability of radioactive isotopes provided the technology necessary for understanding how molecules are transported across biological membranes, which are the very thin boundaries of living cells; the environment maintained by membranes in cells differs from the external environment and permits cellular function. The Danish physiologist August Krogh laid the groundwork in this subject; his pupil, Hans Ussing, developed the conceptual means by which the transport of ions (charged atoms) across membranes can be identified. Ussing’s definition of active transport made possible an understanding, at the cellular level, of the way in which ions and water are pumped into and out of living cells in order to regulate the ionic composition and water balance in cells, organs, and organisms. The molecular mechanism by which these processes occur, however, remains to be discovered.
In addition to the function of transport, membranes also are utilized as templates on which such molecules as enzymes, which must function in a sequential fashion, can be kept in the requisite order. Although great progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms by which specific atoms are assembled into large biological molecules, the principles involved in the assembly of molecules into membranes, which are organized structures of a higher degree of complexity than large molecules, are not yet very well understood. There is reason to believe that the incorporation of a molecule into a membrane endows it with properties that differ from those of a molecule in solution. A primary task of biophysics is to understand the physical character of these cooperative interactions that are essential to life.
Muscle contraction
A.V. Hill developed exquisitely sensitive temperature sensors for measuring heat generated during muscular contraction; he initiated studies relating this heat to the thermodynamic parameters responsible for it. The electron microscope in the years following World War II made possible the description of muscular contraction at a structural level, though the mechanisms involved in the flow of heat during the process are not yet known. Simultaneously, in the 1960s, but independently, various physicists postulated the sliding-filament theory of muscular contraction, according to which muscles contract by the sliding of one filament along another and not by a springlike coiling. Remarkable advances, based on the use of techniques such as X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy, have made it possible to visualize many of the molecules involved in the process. The entire process of muscular contraction, in terms of an identification of the molecules and a description of the chemical reactions in the muscle fibre, has been almost completely explained.
Sensory communication
The above comprise a few specific examples of the scope of biophysics. One area, difficult to discuss in specific terms, is that of sensory communication. Because stimuli, particularly those of a visible or auditory nature, can easily be specified in exact physical terms, they have excited the interest of physical scientists since before 1850. Modern electronic techniques make it relatively easy to distinguish true signals from noise; in addition, computers make possible the performance of significant experiments concerning the complex relationship between stimulus and action. Quantitative analysis of sensory response is very difficult, however, because it involves a synthesis of the action of many cells. It has been pointed out that
Arthur K. SolomonAn adequate theory of sensory function implies an adequate theory of brain function. And an adequate theory of brain function in its turn requires that the nervous system’s behavioral repertory be predictably related to the behaviour of the elements that compose it.