William Bialek, Winner of the 2018 Max Delbruck Prize in Biological Physcis

William Bialek is this year’s winner of the American Physical Society’s 2018 Max Delbruck Prize in Biological Physics “for the application of general theoretical principles of physics and information theory to help understand and predict how biological systems function across a variety of scales, form molecules and cells, to brains and animal collectives.”

Biophysics:
Searching for Principles,
by William Bialek.

Bialek is author of the textbook Biophysics: Searching for Principles. When preparing this blog post, I checked out this book from the Oakland University Library and glanced through it. It is different from Intermediate Physics for Medicine and Biology in many ways. For instance, it is a graduate text, aimed at grad students in physics, whereas IPMB is targeted at undergraduates who have had a year of introductory physics and a year of calculus. Biophysics emphasizes events at the molecular scale, while in the preface to IPMB Russ Hobbie and I write “molecular biophysics has been almost completely ignored: excellent texts already exist, and this is not our area of expertise.” One of those excellent texts would be Bialek's Biophysics.

I particularly enjoyed Bialek’s introduction, which is a readable and personal account of his experiences at the intersection of physics and biology. At one point he lists a series of questions that anyone interested in applying physics to biology should think about:

• Where is the boundary between physics and biology?
• Is biophysics really physics or just the application of methods from physics to the problems of biology?
• My biologist friends tell me that “theoretical biology” is nonsense [Yikes!], so what would theoretical physicists be doing if they got interested in this field?
• In the interaction between physics and biology, what happens to chemistry?
• How much biology do I need to know to make progress?
• Why do physicists and biologists seem to be speaking such different languages?
• Can I be interested in biological problems and still be a physicist, or do I have to become a biologist?

The entire introduction (indeed, the entire book) is an attempt to answer these questions. If you don’t have access to the book, you could read his similarly themed article available on the physics archive: “Perspectives on Theory at the Interface of Physics and Biology.”

Like IPMB, Bialek’s book has many homework problems. Readers of this blog know that I enjoy reducing biological and medical physics principles down to homework problems, so this footnote from Bialek’s introduction resonated with me:

“In some sections I found it difficult to formulate manageable problems. I worry that this reflects poorly on my understanding.”

For those of you who prefer video over text, below is a three-part interview with Bialek from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics

Also, here is a video of Bialek giving the 2017 Buhl Lecture “The Physics of Life: How Much Can We Calculate?”

Enjoy!