edited by Ahmed H Zewail (California Institute of Technology, USA)

Table of Contents (214k)
Chapter 1: The Preoccupations of Twenty-First-Century Biology (166k)

This is an avant-garde book edited by Nobel Laureate Ahmed Zewail with contributions from eminent scientists including four Nobel prize winners. The perspectives of these world leaders in physics, chemistry, and biology define potential new frontiers at the interface of disciplines and including physical, systems, and synthetic biology.

This book brings about the confluence of concepts and tools, and that of different disciplines, to address significant problems of our time: visualization; theory and computation for complexity; macromolecular function, protein folding and misfolding; and systems integration from cells to consciousness. The scope of tools is wide-ranging, spanning imaging, crystallography, microfluidics, single-molecule spectroscopy, and synthetic probe targeting. Concepts such as dynamic self-assembly, molecular recognition, non-canonical amino acids, and others are covered in various chapters as they are cornerstones in building the trilogy description of behavior-structure, dynamics, and function.

The volume is uniquely structured to provide overviews with historical perspectives on the evolution of ideas and on the future of physical biology and biological complexity, from atoms to medicine.

• The Preoccupations of Twenty-First-Century Biology (D Baltimore)
• The World as Physics, Mathematics and Nothing Else (A Varshavsky)
• Physical Biology: 4D Visualization of Complexity (A H Zewail)
• Revolutionary Developments from Atomic to Extended Structural Imaging (J M Thomas)
• Physical Biology at the Crossroads (C Bustamante)
• The Challenge of Quasi-Regular Structures in Biology (R D Kornberg)
• The Future of Biological X-Ray Analysis (D C Rees)
• Reinterpreting the Genetic Code: Implications for Macromolecular Design, Evolution and Analysis (D A Tirrell)
• Designing Ligands to Bind Tightly to Proteins (G M Whitesides et al.)
• Biology by the Numbers (R Phillips)
• Eppur si muove (M Parrinello)
• Protein Folding and Beyond: Energy Landscapes and the Organization of Living Matter in Time and Space (P G Wolynes)
• Protein Folding and Misfolding: From Atoms to Organisms (C M Dobson)
• A Systems Approach to Medicine Will Transform Healthcare (L Hood)
• The Neurobiology of Consciousness (C Koch & F Mormann)
• Computer-Aided Drug Discovery: Physics-based Simulations from the Molecular to the Cellular Level (J A McCammom)
• Precision Measurements in Biology (S R Quake)
• Potassium Channels and the Atomic Basis of Selective Ion Conduction (R MacKinnon)
• Symmetry Breaking, Delocalization and Dynamics in Electron Transfer Systems (N S Hush)
• The Initial Value Representation of Semiclassical Theory: A Practical Way for Adding Quantum Effects to Classical Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Complex Molecular Systems (W H Miller)