Preface 



This book is primarily intended to provide the student of biological 

 sciences or of medicine with a substantial introduction into Biophysics. 

 The subject matter, discussed in the Introduction, has been carefully chosen 

 during ten years of teaching the subject. During this time the author has 

 watched, in the literature, the subject begin to crystallize out from a rather 

 nebulous mass of ideas and practices; and at the same time he has been able 

 to observe what the students of this discipline require. Therefore, the book 

 has been written with the needs of both student and teacher in mind, with 

 the hope that this presentation of the choice of subject matter and the 

 method of presenting it will be useful to others. 



Three objectives have been kept in mind in the presentation: (1 ) to build 

 up from the easy to the difficult; (2) to make the presentation interesting; 

 and (3) to unify it. Accordingly, the book generally increases in difficulty 

 from an oriented review with pertinent examples in the first part, through 

 more difficult material in the middle and later parts. Occasional relaxations, 

 which reduce the information rate and afford occasions for exemplification 

 with biological material, are included. A rather vigorous insistence on 

 dimensional analysis has been hidden in the presentation, in the attempt to 

 make the concepts and definitions precise. Following early definition, 

 different units and methods of expressing them are used, so that the reader 

 will not be awed by them when he studies further elsewhere. Wherever 

 possible, recent work is introduced. 



Since the name "Biophysics" means so many different things to so many 

 different people, the big difficulty has been to decide what not to write. In 

 the interests of a unified presentation within a two-semester book, the limits 

 chosen were concepts and mechanisms, with a minimizing of the method- 

 ology which has already been treated in elegant fashion by others. 



There are some novel features about this book. The author has found 

 them useful in his classes and would be pleased to receive the reader's 

 opinions. Although bioenergetics in the broad sense of the term permeates 

 the major part of the book from Chapter 2 through Chapter 9, it reaches 

 its peak of interest in Chapter 7 in a conceptual presentation where the 



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