Guest Speaker - Andrew Zangwill

Andrew Zangwill, School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology

"A Century of Biological Physics in America"

Biophysics is an intriguing scientific enterprise  where no consensus ever developed about exactly what constitutes its content and scope. That lack of definition allowed the subject to flourish at  industrial,  government, and private laboratories where disciplinary boundaries are easy to cross. Conversely,  because many academic physicists do not consider biophysics to be a part of physics at all, more than a few American physics departments have historically excluded biophysicists from their faculties.  In this talk, I explore the development of biological physics in the United States over the past century,  focusing particular attention on how the disciplinary  inertia of academic physicists has affected that development.