You\u2019re a quantitative person and you want to learn biology.\u00a0 My friend, you are in a difficult situation.\u00a0 If you really want to learn how biology works in a big-picture sense, as opposed to cutting yourself a very narrow slice of the great biological pie, then you have a challenging road ahead of you.\u00a0 Fortunately, many have walked it before you, and I want to give you some advice based on my own experiences.\u00a0 I should say at the outset that my own learning has focused mostly on the cell-biology part of the pie – not physiology, zoology, ecology, \u2026 and so my comments here refer to learning cell biology.<\/p>\n
The scary thing is that I have been at this for almost 20 years (very part-time admittedly) and I would never dare to call myself a cell biologist.\u00a0 But I think it\u2019s fair to say that by now I have a decent sense of what I know and what I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 I will never be able to draw out the Krebs cycle, but I have a qualitative sense of its purpose and importance, as well as of general principles of cycles and catalyzed reactions in biochemistry.\u00a0 Not that impressive, I know, but I\u2019m proud of it anyway.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re looking at this post, you\u2019ve probably already tried to read a general, molecular or cell biology book and suffered the usual fate of the quantitative scientist: the sense of being overwhelmed by so many special cases \u2026 and wondering whether there are basic principles at play beyond the quantum mechanics of chemical reactions.\u00a0 My advice is to hold onto that 1,500 page book – it will be a great reference, I promise.\u00a0 (My own favorite is Alberts et al., Molecular Biology of the Cell, <\/em>which actually has a solid physical grounding.)\u00a0 But there are much better places to start.<\/p>\n Required text #1: <\/strong>The Way of the Cell,<\/em> by Franklin Harold, Oxford, 2001.<\/p>\n Call (or go to) your favorite local bookstore and order Franklin Harold\u2019s The Way of the Cell.<\/em>\u00a0 This is the introductory book you\u2019ve been waiting for.\u00a0 It\u2019s 15 years old now, and a lot of new things have been discovered in biology, but Harold\u2019s book sticks close to the fundamentals and so little of it is out of date.\u00a0 I would say his book is fairly prescient in many ways, foreseeing the importance of a \u201csystems\u201d view of the cell, for example.<\/p>\n The first thing you should know about Franklin Harold is that he is a bioenergeticist.\u00a0 His job has been to understand the physics of metabolism, roughly speaking, and he wrote a famous textbook on the subject.\u00a0 He can discuss the tension between physical and biological worldviews in a profound way.\u00a0 He was inspired to pursue biology partly because of Erwin Schrodinger\u2019s What is Life? <\/em>\u00a0He is also a beautiful writer who sets the context for cell biology in the stream of evolution and the origin of life.<\/p>\n Harold does discuss textbook subjects like the tree of life and cell shape variation, but he does so in ways that will make you understand and remember.\u00a0 The archaea, for example, while still single-celled, are as divergent from bacteria as they are from eukaryotes, which was first recognized from ribosomal RNA.\u00a0 And why ribosomal RNA?\u00a0 You\u2019d better read the book.<\/p>\n Most importantly for quantitative and physical scientists, Harold clarifies the energetic nature of molecular processes – and how energy makes it way from the sun\u2019s photons to our ATP.\u00a0 Pictures, examples, and layman\u2019s descriptions of key experiments are given.\u00a0 As a bioenergeticist, Harold is very much at home discussing free energy and the importance of (non-equilibrium) energy flows.<\/p>\n An overarching theme is why the cell is more than sum of its parts.\u00a0 \u201cHow do lifeless chemicals come together to produce those exquisitely ordered structures we call organisms?\u201d\u00a0 In physical terms, this can be framed as a self-assembly problem.\u00a0 We know that (many) proteins fold spontaneously, that lipid bilayers assemble spontaneously.\u00a0 So why can\u2019t a cell be made by mixing up all the constituent molecules?\u00a0 Part of the answer comes from the \u2018historical\u2019 nature of a cell: each cell was produced from an earlier cell.\u00a0 Harold offers a simple counter-example to answer the self-assembly thought experiment: most membrane-spanning proteins are directional, not symmetric and must face a certain way to function properly; spontaneous self-assembly would not distinguish the two orientations, however.<\/p>\n Harold accomplishes the key task of tempering the traditional biological world view (i.e., that the sum is more than its parts – and so understanding parts alone fails to capture biology) with recognition of the important contributions from quantitative and physical perspectives.\u00a0 Unlike some more conservative biologists, Harold welcomes the input of a wide diversity of scientists concentrating on biological questions, and you will learn about contributions from a range of quantitative scientists besides Schrodinger – Morrow, Prigogine, Turing, to name just a few.<\/p>\n The book follows Harold\u2019s own research focus on single-celled organisms.\u00a0 The cell, after all, is the essential unit of life.\u00a0 Beautiful plants and animals are just extensions and generalizations of that unit.\u00a0 Harold\u2019s deep knowledge of the microbiological world frames most of the discussion and offers openings to discusses cell division, shape variation, and much more.<\/p>\n The Way of the Cell <\/em>is great science writing by an author who knows the big picture and the details – and who balances them just right in a clear, beautiful book.\u00a0 I consider it truly required reading for anyone who wants to get a comprehensible overview of cell biology.\u00a0 In the 250 pages of Harold\u2019s book, you will absorb much more than you ever could from a cell biology textbook five times the length.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You\u2019re a quantitative person and you want to learn biology.\u00a0 My friend, you are in a difficult situation.\u00a0 If you really want to learn how biology works in a big-picture sense, as opposed to cutting yourself a very narrow slice of the great biological pie, then you have a challenging road ahead of you.\u00a0 Fortunately, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,11,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-general-biophysics","category-learning-biology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/statisticalbiophysicsblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/statisticalbiophysicsblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/statisticalbiophysicsblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/statisticalbiophysicsblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/statisticalbiophysicsblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/statisticalbiophysicsblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":138,"href":"https:\/\/statisticalbiophysicsblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions\/138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/statisticalbiophysicsblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/statisticalbiophysicsblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/statisticalbiophysicsblog.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}