Preface

Acknowledgements

Author biography

1 Molecular
communication - crackling phone lines

2 How
dynein works and other motor proteins

3 How
brains work - wiring and consciousness

4 Spike
trains and the senses - the mouse's whiskers

5 Elastic
turbulence - gloopy chaos

6 How
mucus works - the twenty one mysteries in man

7 Synthetic
biology - reengineering bugs and molecules

8 Missing
instruments - grease monkeys required

9 The
structure of carbohydrates - the perfect chip

10 Evolution
and antibiotics - bugmageddon

11 The
regulation of expression in DNA - huge uncertainties in genetics

12 The
origin of sub-diffusion inside cells - everything's gone fractional

13 Microrheology
- the unexplored continents

14 Quantum
phenomena in biology - the role of chunks

15 The
structure of membranes - uncharted factories

16 Drug
delivery - gene therapy and other stories

17 A
good model for polyelectrolytes - bootstrapping with a many body problem
18 The
activity of hearts - the pump that quivers

Some Critical Questions in Biological Physics discusses 18 key questions in biological physics, each forming independent chapters that will, by presenting the research in terms of key, unsolved problems, encourage interest in the field. Each chapter includes an introduction that is meant to be accessible to all readers followed by a section containing more technical details that may be of greater interest to specialists but still written in an accessible style. The book provides useful reading for undergraduate physical scientists considering a research career in the life science by presenting biological physics in a coherent modern framework. Additionally, it includes material relevant to medicine, pharmaceutics and biotechnology, and demonstrates biological physics with modern examples with a readily approachable style.
The biological physics problems described in the book are of critical importance to the field. However, to discuss them with any authority, the biological physics problems chosen are predominantly a compilation of some of the author's personal bugbears, that himself and members of the community have had to live with for many years. Thus a selection of unsolved problems will be presented, with different levels of difficulty, ranging from practically unsolvable questions, such as the many-body problem with a long-range interaction, or the Navier-Stokes equations in an arbitrary geometry, to some much more modest targets to build up a researcher's confidence.

Dr Thomas Andrew Waigh was a physics undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh and then completed a PhD in the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. This was followed by a two-year post-doc at the Collège de France in Paris, in the laboratory of Pierre Giles de Gennes. He then returned to the UK with a lectureship in physics at the University of Leeds. Currently, he is a senior lecturer in biological physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester. Previously, he has written two books on biological physics, Applied Biophysics and The Physics of Living Processes: a Mesoscopic Approach, published by Wiley. He has published more than 80 articles.