The 17th September issue of Nature focused on interdisciplinary research, and featured both an impassioned defence of research that breaches the disciplinary boundaries which have traditionally provided the structure for most academic institutions, and a plea for the necessity of interdisciplinary studies to address science’s, and the world’s, most pressing problems. One such interdisciplinary field is biophysics. But what biophysics is, and exactly why it is critical to the advancement of science is not immediately obvious. Why should combining physics and biology be so profoundly useful when the subject matters traditionally explored by physicists and biologists seem to be quite different?

One clue perhaps lies in the idea that imposing disciplinary divisions onto nature is an organisational structure that is needed to help us understand the immense complexity of the world – it is not any reflection on the fundamental characteristics of nature. If this is true, perhaps the fusion of these disciplines is inevitable and welcome. But the division between physics and biology is not just material: physicists and biologists tend to view the world with different intellectual philosophies. In particular, physics tends to concentrate on fundamental universal laws and adhere to the proposition that mathematical formulations (preferably simple and eloquent ones) can explain nearly everything. Werner Heisenberg, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, noted that “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Another advantage of biophysics is thus that introducing physical and mathematical ideas brings a new ‘method of questioning’ to biological problems, which exposes novel and fascinating aspects of biology.

Biophysics therefore encompasses the application of techniques and ideas from the reductionist and mathematical physical sciences to complex biological phenomena. The field is concerned with questions at all levels of biology, from the electrical potentials within cells to population migration patterns. Biophysics attempts to study biology with physical principles in mind, with the aim of arriving at mathematical models that can describe biological systems more precisely than current qualitative descriptions.

Cambridge’s rich scientific history includes many pioneering biophysical discoveries. In the early 1950s, for example, Cambridge physiologists Alan Lloyd Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley published a series of elegant experiments on how neurons – the cells which carry information throughout the nervous system – transmit electrical signals through the body. Their studies culminated in a mathematical model explaining their observations and supplying future neuroscientists with an elegant predictive and quantitative paradigm of neuron function. In 1963 Hodgkin and Huxley were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology (also shared with Australian neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles) for their groundbreaking work. And barely a year after Hodgkin and Huxley published their results, two scientists at the Cavendish Laboratory – Francis Crick, a physicist by training, and molecular biologist James Watson – published research outlining the double-helical structure of DNA, the molecule which encodes genetic information.

This rich tradition of collaboration and innovation continues at Cambridge today. Across the science faculties, cutting-edge biophysical research is addressing critical and fascinating problems drawn from some of the most fundamental preoccupations of biology: how are substances transported across biological membranes? How did multicellular organisms develop? And how do neurons know where to grow in the brain?

Initiatives like Cambridge’s Theory of Living Matter group strive to connect biologists working on complex problems, with physicists and mathematicians well versed in mathematical and computational modelling. The recently founded Cambridge/Crick/UCL Physical Biology Network promotes collaborations and knowledge-sharing among biophysicists at Cambridge, and University College London and the Francis Crick Institute in London. For ten years Cambridge has hosted the Physics of Living Matter Symposium, a conference which brings together leading researchers from across all areas of biophysics. The vibrant and active community of biophysics researchers at Cambridge makes our university an exciting place to be part of this burgeoning field.