Biology can be helpful to open-minded physicists

Sir

Your News Feature¹ “Bridging the culture gap” is a welcome update on the status of interdisciplinary research in biology, as relevant today as it was 15 years ago when Arthur Kornberg commented on a similar topic².

Communication is a major barrier that impedes collaboration between biologists and physicists.

Biologists tend to start by asking a specific question for a specific biological system. The answers to specific questions gradually contribute to the delineation of general principles.

Many physicists, when addressing biological problems, consider themselves as generalists who are more interested in developing general theories or finding evidence to fit them.

Although physicists can dismiss biologists' explanations as too “empirical and descriptive”, this level of explanation is apparently good enough for biologists and has served biology well in practice. Physicists' quantitative explanations may well provide a deeper level of mechanistic understanding, but deeper is not necessarily better if important biological context is lost. The satisfaction of scientific explanation is a relative term and exists in the eye of the beholder. Insisting on the most fundamental explanation for every biological phenomenon brings us all the way down to the elementary particles, which is beyond the scope not only of biology but also of many subdisciplines in physics.

The physicists who make the greatest strides in interdisciplinary research are open-minded, genuinely interested in biological problems and determined to make the transition. They apply quantitative techniques to address questions of interest to biologists.

John Hopfield is an excellent example of a physicist whose theoretical models have always focused on biological functions. In addition to his work on neural networks in the 1980s, as mentioned in your feature, in the 1970s Hopfield developed a series of elegant models on kinetic proofreading to explain the extremely low error rate in the biosynthesis of macromolecules and kinetic cooperativity of haemoglobin (see, for example, refs 3 and 4 respectively). These models and their variations have been enthusiastically embraced by biologists and are now being applied to areas of immunology, signal transduction, intracellular transport, DNA disentanglement and protein folding in vivo to explain why small quantitative changes in molecular interactions can lead to qualitative differences in biological function, as well as how biochemical energy can be used to improve the accuracy of molecular processes.

Although the idea of interdisciplinary research has been around for a long time and has been actively promoted by agencies such as the US National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, it is far from reaching its potential.

It is to be hoped that opportunities in genomics and other data-rich biological fields can finally provide the necessary attraction to drive more and more interested physicists towards biology — and to keep them there.