Edited by Nobel Laureate, Ahmed Zewail, this pioneering book on physical biology includes contributions from four Nobel laureates and other eminent scientists.

This book brings about the confluence of various concepts and tools to address significant problems of our time in physical biology and adjacent disciplines. The volume is structured to provide a broad perspective on current state-of-the-art methods and concepts at the heart of chemical and biological behavior, covering the topics of visualization; theory and computation for complexity; macromolecular function, protein folding, and protein misfolding; molecular recognition; 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, either molecular or by metallic particles. The perspectives are from the point of view of world leaders in physics, chemistry, and biology; and they define potential new frontiers at the interface of these disciplines, including physical, systems, and synthetic biology.

Contents: The Preoccupations of 21st-Century Biology (D Baltimore); Physical Biology: 4D Visualization of Complexity (A H Zewail); The Challenge of Quasi-Regular Structures in Biology (R D Kornberg); The Future of Biological X-ray Analysis (D C Rees); Biology by the Numbers (R Phillips); The Neurobiology of Consciousness (C Koch & F Mormann); Precision Measurements in Biology (S R Quake); Symmetry Breaking, Delocalization and Dynamics in Electron Transfer Systems (N S Hush); and other papers.