ABSTRACT
The study of biological molecules and tissues is of vital importance to the development of effective pharmaceuticals. Indeed, there is no necessity to outline the many ways in which an understanding of the structure and behaviour of such materials has influenced the development of medicinal agents, other than to emphasise a single point. Not only must the chemical composition of biological materials be understood, but the physical arrangement of biological molecules and the manner in which they behave and interact in these arrangements must also be studied. Indeed, the physical chemistry and materials science aspects of biological tissues are often poorly understood. The principal reason for this problem is arguably that biological tissues are so chemically, let alone structurally, complex that it is extremely difficult to find techniques which are capable of characterising the physical structure of these materials. Differential scanning calorimetry is useful but is an invasive technique and of limited value for anything other than comparison between samples. Raman spectroscopy, Fourier transform IR, X-ray diffraction and other spectroscopic techniques are useful but, due to their moleculespecific nature, provide spectra which are so complex that again, considerable difficulties lie in interpretation. It is therefore necessary to consider two factors in the context of this chapter. Firstly, there is still a considerable need to develop techniques which are capable of usefully examining biological tissues. Secondly, characterisation of such materials is never going to be a simple task and one should not expect straightforward answers unless one is using a method so crude and non-specific that the usefulness of the resultant data is questionable.
