Preface 



This monograph has an explicit purpose: to facilitate the introduction 

 of biophysics into the elementary biology course. 



The reason for wanting to introduce biophysics is that the obvious 

 trend in biology is toward physical and chemical biology. By the time 

 the present generation of students has reached scientific maturity, twenty 

 years will have passed, and our students will be scientifically obsolete 

 unless they have been taught to think in physico-chemical terms from 

 their earliest courses. 



At present, practically all biophysics courses are given on the senior- 

 graduate level. In teaching my own course on that level, I have been 

 struck many times by the fact that a substantial fraction of the topics in 

 biophysics utilizes only elementary mathematics, physics, and chemistry. 

 There arose the possibility of designing an introductory biophysics course 

 using only those elementary courses as prerequisites. However, it is un- 

 likely at present that any department, including my own, would install 

 such a course, because of the pressure of covering the broad scope of 

 science that is included in present-day biology. Another means of 

 achieving the goal is to give, say, a three- or four-week introduction to 

 biophysics within the introductory course as just another of the facets of 

 biology that are surveyed. The economy of paperback monographs has 

 permitted the writing of a short introduction to biophysics without 

 writing an entire textbook. 



The majority of introductory biology courses appears to be given in 

 the freshman year. Thus, even by placing the "month of biophysics" at 

 the end of the course, the students will have had only the year of biology 

 and probably a year of chemistry or physics, along with high school 

 mathematics and science. Accordingly, one of the severe problems has 

 been to choose topics suitable for a very elementary presentation. There- 

 fore there have been important omissions, aside from the fact that this 

 short coverage is intended for beginning students. For example, there is 

 no discussion of membrane properties, nerve physiology, enzyme kinetics, 

 information theory, etc. Some items are omitted for the reason that the 

 complexity is too great, others because I judge them not sufficiently 

 developed at the present time, and still others because a monograph is 

 necessarily rather short. Even though I wanted to offer teachers a selec- 

 tion among possible topics, some have been omitted because they are 

 likely to be covered in other introductory courses. What remains, then, 

 is a selection that seems reasonable to me. 



