Growing up in the Philippines, avocado was only ever eaten for dessert at our dinner table: scooped out and served with a sprinkling of table sugar, or, in my more favored protocol, drizzled with condensed milk. (Try it!) When I moved to the United States for graduate school, however, I was shocked to learn that here, avocado is a savory accoutrement, sliced thinly and layered onto eggs and toast (?) or fried chicken and waffles (?!?!). Somehow, in my mind the concept of the avocado had undergone a kind of redoubling, fracturing into a past that inheres and a present into which it inheres. I’m reminded of Henri Bergson’s reflection in Creative Evolution (1907): “Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed.” The avocado is alive, suffused with the passage of time and new experiences. If that can be said for eating avocado, then what of much bigger, much more complicated things? What of biophysics?

Karl Pearson (of correlation coefficient fame, but also known for his horrifying views) first coined “bio-physics” (with the hyphen) in 1892. In The Grammar of Science, reflecting on a mechanistic, billiard-ball universe, he roughly defined our field as a “branch of science… dealing with the application of the laws of inorganic phenomena… to the development of organic forms.” It’s important to me that biophysics is not a floating signifier, but I don’t usually like resorting to etymologies or dictionary definitions when motivating any discussion, because at some point, words are just words. I once heard a funny story on a podcast about the historical naming of Aristotle’s Metaphysics: as the story goes, the Metaphysics was not so named for the relation of its contents to physical reality, but simply because in wherever ancient library it was discovered, the book was placed after – “meta” – the Physics. Now, that story might be apocryphal, it might not; regardless, that’s what’s in a name: sometimes a useful label, but still only a callsign. We scientists are supposed to care about facts and relations more than names like Tiggy-winkle hedgehog or Spätzle or biophysics. We scientists are supposed to care more about what the thing does in the world.

Thus, an analysis of biophysics from its meaning as a word can only get us so far.

If I endeavor to give our field of study the old avocado treatment, then I’ll have to return to where it all began for me: in college, where I learned of a pioneering book by an unexpected author. In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger (of wave equation and superpositional feline fame) explicated some of the earliest musings on biophysics as we recognize it today in a tiny little volume. His What is Life? is a collection of lectures delivered in Dublin surrounding a problematized question: “How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?” Whereas Pearson’s articulation implies a one-way import of physical ideas into biological systems, the Austrian asked a more all-encompassing question of mechanisms and inner workings (“how”). As early as 1944, Schrödinger expressed such prescient ideas as cells eating negative entropy and hereditary information perhaps being contained within an “aperiodic crystal.” This latter articulation inspired a certain famous 1953 paper, in which the utility of nucleotide base pairing for materializing genetic information “did not escape the notice” of its authors.

That biophysics was my past, like avocadoes dusted with sugar and eaten with a spoon straight out of the husk. That past inheres today; in a certain way, Schrödinger’s biophysics has never really left me. But what can I say of the present biophysics, into which this past inheres? What questions do we ask, and what answers do we find? What does biophysics do in the world today?

Five years of PhD research has convinced me that if biophysics has its fingers in immunology by now, then it is probably dipping its fingers into every other pot of honey, too. And after an almost-weeklong immersion in BPS 2023, I’ve learned that biophysics really has everything to do with everything. It’s bricolage to the highest degree, borrowing math from astronomy and telescopy to image deeper into tissues, influencing rational drug design with the aid of structural simulations, pushing computer science and hardware development to their utmost limits. If biophysics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought to mind the subordination of subject matter to methodology, today I think it represents a fuzzification of boundaries, an increasingly interdisciplinary approach that characterizes a better way forward for scientific practice. This is what biophysics does in the world: it connects everything. Biophysics ends up actually being the originary hyphen from 1892 that these days we omit.

Therefore, I'm not so sure I agree with Manuel De Landa that “Science” (in this case, biophysics) is a divergent movement, even though we do see it fragmenting into sub-fields, sub-disciplines, and sub-discourses. Even such varied research programs on mechanoreceptors, plasma membrane mechanics, single-molecule imaging, structure determination, molecular dynamics, cytoskeletal cross-talk, and metabolite tracing are still caught up in a network of relations, which imposes on the totality (and therefore on the concept of biophysics) a unifying structure with certain boundaries and overarching paradigms. We're not diverging indefinitely, after all, just caught up in a complex meshwork of ideas, tools, and approaches. This meshwork is alive, flowing, and growing, which is to say that somewhere in biophysics, there is a register – perhaps many registers – in which time is being inscribed. Time is there, embedded in our models; in the movements of the molecules and cells we study; in our meetings, communications, and collaborations; in the way our views evolve and improve with time.

Funnily enough, Pearson comments downstream of his original definition of biophysics that our field “does not appear to have advanced very far at present, but it not improbably has an important future.” From last century to this century, from dessert to main course, from this week to the next: biophysics certainly has no sense of an ending.