title: Letting the cat out of the bag: a personal journey in Biophysics.
abstract: When the author arrived in Berkeley, in the mid 1970s, to study Biophysics he soon felt as if he was engaging himself in a somewhat marginal activity. Biology was then entering another of its cyclical periods of annotation that was to culminate with the human genome project. Two decades later, however, at the end of this process, it had become clear that two main tasks were acquiring a central importance in biological research: a renewed push for a quantitative, precise description of biological systems at the molecular level, and efforts towards an integrated understanding of the operation, control, and coordination of cellular processes. Today, these have become two of the most fertile research areas in Biophysics.
authors.affiliation: Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Chair of Biophysics, Professor of Physics, Molecular &#38; Cell Biology, and Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, USA.
authors.forename: Carlos J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Bustamante
mesh_terms: D001703:Biophysics / Q000266:history*; D004247:DNA / Q000737:chemistry*; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D010568:Peru; D014481:United States
chemical_list: D004247:DNA