Published in Physics World, 1 Jan 2012
Five scientists talk to Jon Cartwright about why they are drawn to problems on the border between biology and physics.
People go into biophysics for a variety of motivations, but if one reason stands out, it is this: it focuses on phenomena that are familiar to all of us. While some topics in physics can seem esoteric and far removed from everyday life, biophysics can be more personal. How does a cell work, for example, or what is the molecular basis of AIDS? These are questions to which everyone can relate.
Yet perhaps biophysics is also attractive to scientists because it is fairly new, and draws from many other disciplines. You might have trained as a nuclear physicist, a computer programmer or a physical chemist and still have much to offer. Here, five scientists with interests in biophysics – all with very different backgrounds – reveal what they enjoy about their subject. […]
The rest of this article is available here.