Princeton Weekly Bulletin November 16, 1998

HHMI supports undergraduate biophysics

By Peter Page

	Biophysics students Scott Perkins (l) and Justin Werfel, both Class of 1999

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded a $1.9 million grant to support undergraduate education at Princeton, including approximately $740,000 for the University's undergraduate certificate Program in Biophysics.

The biophysics program, now in its second year, offers undergraduates a curriculum that integrates molecular biology and physics, without giving either discipline superficial treatment, says program director Edward Cox, Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Biology.

The program, he explains, is designed to prepare a new generation of scientists for the "postgenomics world" that will arrive within a few years when the mapping of the human genome is complete.

The National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, is now "sequencing," or mapping, the three billion units of DNA that contain the programming of human genes -- a process the institute expects to complete by 2003. When this is done, biologists will know in molecular detail the exact construction of human DNA. Sequencing the genomes of dozens of bacteria and yeasts will also have been accomplished, says Cox.

The challenge then will be to ensure that biologists can use the new information to understand the behavior of organisms, such as cell function and life cycles.

"One outstanding feature is the need for biologists to acquire the quantitative skills of physical scientists," Cox observes. "Most molecular biologists lack physics and math beyond the introductory calculus level. And physicists seldom take biology beyond high school. This must change if both are to contribute to molecular, cellular and developmental biology in the postgenomics world."

Biologists need math skills

Cellular biologists of the future, Cox says, will need to test their ideas using the quantitative, mathematical skills traditionally used by physicists.

"Mathematics is a language suited to this kind of endeavor," he says. "It allows us to pursue ideas whose outcomes do not fit our day-to-day ways of thinking, which are mostly linear -- simple cause and effect. There are lots of examples in physics, such as relativity, that people often refer to as 'counterintuitive' -- which is another way to say 'nonlinear.'"

The Biophysics Program will be the largest beneficiary of the HHMI grant; funds will support an additional faculty position and the purchase of lab equipment for instruction in the biophysics of nerve cells. Another third of the grant will bolster a summer research program for students from small colleges around the nation. The rest of the grant will be used to expand a nine-year program of outreach to N.J. high school science teachers and for additional equipment purchases.