Introduction - Membrane Biophysics, Biological and Medical Physics, Biomedical Engineering - page 1

Chapter 1
Introduction
The origin of life clearly lies in a living cell first observed by Sir Robert Hooke, but
exactly where in a cell the essence of life can be localized is still unclear. Over several
centuries careful investigators have been trying to find a single source to claim it as
the point of origin of life. Is it in the cellular inner core where metabolic processes
take place, is it around the cellular boundary where the cell's transport properties
couple with processes controlling many dynamical aspects of proteins, or is it in
some other yet unknown region, or finally, is it nowhere specific but rather, due to
a fundamental mechanism which causes animate matter to qualitatively differ from
inanimate matter? Structural and molecular biology have considerably developed
our understanding of cellular compartments and molecular building blocks of cells,
but the ongoing developments in these fields have raised multifaceted questions
regarding cells and cellular processes. Both the cellular inner core and the cellular
wall, known as a membrane, have been understood as not just composites of different
compartments working independently or collectively and performing many critical
functions for a living body. Detailed analyses of the known functions of various
cellular components suggest that the real discovery of the origin of their functions is
yet to be made.
Living cells are the ultimate examples of complex dynamical systems. For the past
several decades, biologists have greatly advanced the understanding of how living
systems work by focusing on the structure and function of constituent molecules
such as DNA, proteins, and enzymes. Understanding what the constituent parts of
a complex machine are made of, however, does not explain how the entire system
works. Scientific analysis of living systems has posed an enormous challenge and
presented an enormous task. Conceptual advances in physics, vast improvements
in the experimental techniques of molecular and cell biology (electron microscopy,
STM, AFM, etc.), and exponential progress in computational techniques and related
works have brought us to a unique point in the history of science when the expertise
of many areas of science can be brought to bear on the main unsolved puzzle of life,
namely how cells live, divide, and eventually, die.