Principles and methods from the physical sciences have long been applied to questions in biology; however, the application of such principles to the study of cancer biology has only begun to flourish. In the latter part of the 20th century, and especially the last decade, advanced technologies have fueled an unprecedented period of discovery and progress in the molecular
sciences that promises to revolutionize cancer medicine. In 1999, the National Institutes of Health Director, Harold Varmus highlighted this point in his speech at the Centennial Meeting of the American Physical Society by stating, “Biology is rapidly becoming a science that demands more intense mathematical and physical analysis than biologists have been accustomed to, and such analysis will be required to understand the workings of cells.” This issue of Nature Physics Insight – Physics and the Cell reviews a number of areas in which physical scientists are tackling biological problems relating to cells and their interaction with their surroundings.
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Physics assailing cancers
This must be a very useful resource compilation on the stories of attacking problems of cells by physics. [http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v6/n10/pdf/nphys-insight-physics-cell.pdf]
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