H. Ziegler

W. Hoppe

W. Lohmann

H. Markl

What is biophysics? As with all subjects which straddle traditional boundaries between fields, it eludes a precise definition. Furthermore, it is impossible to do biophysics without having a certain foundation of knowledge in biology, physics, physical chemistry, chemistry and biochemistry. One approach to a biophysics textbook would be to refer the student to the literature of these neighboring fields, and to leave the selection of the appropriate supplementary material up to the student. The editors of this volume are of the opinion that it is more useful and less time-consuming to present a selection of the supplementary knowledge, in concentrated form, together with the subject matter specific to biophysics. The reader will thus find in this book introductions to such subjects as the structure and function of the cell, the chemical structure of biogenic macromolecules, and even theoretical chemistry. What, indeed, is biophysics? Must we consider it to include physiology, electromedicine, radiation medicine, etc. ? The field has evolved continuously in recent years. Molecular understanding oflife processes has come more and more to the fore. Just as the field of molecular physics has developed to describe structures and processes in the realm of non-living systems, there has been a corresponding development of molecular biophysics.

Biophysics

R. Mason

Generally it is not sufficiently appreciated that electron microscopy is in fact a diffraction method. In essential aspects electron microscopes are more closely related to X-ray diffracto· meters than to light microscopes. In electron microscopes monochromatized radiation and coherent illumination (never used in light microscopy) correspond in X-ray diffractometers to the primary beam with a small divergence. Imaging ina general sense can take place in interference experiments between a primary beam and a scattered beam, or between diffe rent deflected scattered beams. This leads to the realization of an old dream in diffracto metry, namely to a general experimental solution of the "phase problem". The most im pressive analogy, however, concerns the potential of the electron microscope as a tool for structure determination (where the radiation wavelenght is smaller than the atomic distan ces). It was therefore considered timely to treat this topic in this series. It was a fortunate cioncidence that in 1976 a Workshop on "Unconventional Electron Microscope Methods for the Investigation of Molecular Structures" (sponsored by the European Molecular Biology Organisation, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Max-Planck-Gesell schaft) took place, and that most speakers presenting introductory lectures agreed to publish their contributions in an expanded version in this volume. This volume is thus not a symposium report in the usual sense since it contains the majority of these introductory lectures only.

W. Hoppe

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