ABSTRACT

Biophysical chemistry may be defined as the application of physical chemistry to biological systems. The underlying question (e.g. [1]) is whether the laws of physics and chemistry suffice to understand biology. This question, whose origins go back a long way and which encompasses notions of vitalism and so on, has still not been definitively answered. Nowadays it is formulated somewhat differently, typically as ‘What emergent properties are needed to characterize biological systems?’ Half a century ago the prevailing view was encapsulated in a rather well-known statement of P A M Dirac: ‘The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble.’ Biology being even more complicated than chemistry, the difficulty was expected to be correspondingly greater. Nevertheless, as P W Anderson [2] has pointed out, biology is not applied chemistry, any more than chemistry is applied physics. Emergent properties are expected to arise through increases in scale and complexity, and there is no need to endow them with mystical attributes: one hopes to formulate them in mathematical terms just like the descriptions of simpler systems.