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Physical biology of the cell, Second Edition

Article in Crystallography Reviews · October 2013

DOI: 10.1080/0889311X.2013.830112

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Physical biology of the cell, Second

Edition
a
Joël Janin
a
IBBMC, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France
Published online: 12 Aug 2013.

To cite this article: Joël Janin (2013) Physical biology of the cell, Second Edition, Crystallography
Reviews, 19:4, 273-274, DOI: 10.1080/0889311X.2013.830112

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 Crystallography Reviews, 2013
Vol. 19, No. 4, 273–274

BOOK REVIEW

Physical biology of the cell, Second edition, by Rob Phillips, Jane Kondev, Julie Theriot, and
Hernan G. Garcia, illustrated by Nigel Orme, London and New York, Garland Science, 2013,
1055 pp., £49.88 (paperback), ISBN-10: 0815344503, ISBN-13: 978-0815344506

Physical Biology of the Cell is a major textbook written by four top biophysicists engaged in
Downloaded by [Joël Janin] at 00:57 04 November 2013

research and teaching at first-class institutions in the USA. The first edition of the book is only
a few years old (2009), yet the second edition expands it by 200 pages, and adds new digital
tools and computer code to solve selected problems. It covers many topics in a field, physical
biology, that is not easy to define, let alone to teach. The title might imply that the authors aim
to present all that physics has to say about the living cell. But it can also be read as meaning:
all that is not in Bruce Alberts’ Molecular Biology of the Cell. Indeed, Physical Biology of the
Cell keeps away from most of the topics in that famous book and other molecular biology and
biochemistry textbooks. Thus, DNA replication is mentioned only for the Meselson–Stahl exper-
iment, and the cell cycle is given only two pages of text and a figure. However, the feature that
makes Physical Biology of the Cell stand out from other textbooks is not so much what is in it,
than the way it is organized. A biochemistry or biophysics textbook usually begins with atoms
and molecules, and moves on from the molecular level to the more complex levels of the cell
and the organism. Instead, Physical Biology of the Cell presents topics of physics and cell
biology as a loosely connected set, illustrated by the cover of the second edition which displays
the map of an imaginary archipelago with islands marked ‘giant axons’ or ‘excited state’, and seas
labelled ‘ion channel’ or ‘grand partition’. Can one really go from an axon to an excited state (of
the axon?) by crossing a sea of ‘grand partition’? Nevertheless, the authors appear to take that
image seriously, and they describe their book as being not a comprehensive survey of the cell,
but a map designed to ‘help curious people discover unfamiliar territories’. Presumably, they
intend the reader to sail his boat from port to port, drawing his own itinerary and collecting shav-
ings of knowledge in either physics or biology. This may sound appealing, but when I attempted
to design a tour of my own, I felt caught in a 1000-page literary maze. The authors may have
anticipated this reaction, as they quote (on p. 4) the master of the genre, Jorge Luis Borges,
who write about an ‘Art of Cartography’ that yielded ‘a vast map [that] was useless’. Borges’ lit-
erary mazes take you to places you never knew existed – and they do only in his fertile mind. A
textbook has a different purpose, and the logic of its organization ought to be clear if it is to be
used as a map or a guide.
One may expect that logic to show in the list of contents. That of Physical Biology of the Cell
lists 22 chapters grouped into four parts: ‘The facts of life’ (Part 1), ‘Life at rest’ (Part 2), ‘Life in
motion’ (Part 3), and ‘The meaning of life’ (Part 4). The titles give no hint of what the parts
contain: ‘The meaning of life’ covers not existentialism, but transcription regulation, morphogen
gradients, and DNA sequence analysis lumped together. Giving up the idea of using the list of
contents to draw an itinerary for myself, I decided to visit specific locations with the help of
the index. The results were uneven. Looking for ‘crystallography’ led me nowhere: the word is
absent from the book. On the other hand, ‘ribosome’ appeared at several places, but all were
 274 Book review

incidental except for a page on deriving phylogenetic trees from rRNA sequences. If the ribosome
is properly represented in a later edition, it will find its place in Chapter 16 on molecular motors,
along with kinesin, myosin, and the bacterial flagellum. The subject is close to the authors’ heart,
and the visit to this chapter was highly rewarding: it develops the mathematics of biased diffusion,
and explains with it how a molecular motor can progress in one direction while performing a
random walk. Similarly, I enjoyed reading Chapter 6 (‘Entropy rules!’), a 40-page class on stat-
istical mechanics that goes into the details of the derivation of the Boltzmann distribution and the
law of mass action, and then Chapter 7 that develops applications of these theories to ligand
binding in two-state systems such as haemoglobin and ion channels. The two chapters together
make up a full course on allostery, even though the word does not appear in the chapter titles.
I am sure there are many other fine sites to visit in the Physical Biology of the Cell archipelago.
The book is well illustrated, problems and references complete each chapter, figures and other
data can be downloaded from the Garland Science Web site. Its public is assumed to be students
taking a first course in physical biology or biophysics, and scientists interested in physical mod-
elling in biology. Physical Biology of the Cell has much to offer to both categories, but the way it
Downloaded by [Joël Janin] at 00:57 04 November 2013

is arranged implies that students will need attentive coaching, and scientists, more than the usual
effort, to find the nuggets in it.

Joël Janin
IBBMC, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France
joel.janin@u-psud.fr
© 2013, Joël Janin
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0889311X.2013.830112

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