Customer Reviews

Biophysical Chemistry

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I had this book completely wrong...I ordered it not expecting an introductory textbook, but an overview of current topics. So my dumb mistake might give me a slanted view of this book, but nonetheless I read it "as a textbook" (since even basic textbooks can be useful) and frankly was underwhelmed. Despite heroic effort and a very clear, approachable style, Allen fails to deliver for two reasons. First, the book is at far too basic a level to be useful; Allen assumes little or no background in physical chemistry. He therefore has to use up most of the space in the chapters building up the basics of physical chemistry before getting to the biophysics. As a result the book reads like a sub-par undergraduate phys chem text with examples and practice problems taken from biochemistry. This is charitable but not realistic: anyone unfamiliar with rate equations is not ready for biophysics, period. And because the text jumps from basics to "real" problems in biophysical chemistry as examples, the connections between the background and the examples are often unclear. A particularly glaring example is in the chapter on statistical mechanics, in which Allen explains prions as a problem in statistical thermodynamics (a reach, to say the least...I suspect he wanted to discuss prions and could find no other place to shoehorn them in). To be fair, the later chapters are better in this respect; the section on membranes and electrical signaling is fairly strong. Second, the book tries to cover too much ground. "Biophysics" is an umbrella term covering lots of nonoverlapping, barely-related subjects (metabolism and energetics, protein folding, electrophysiology, cell contractility, etc.). To cover most of these topics in one book seems too ambitious to me, unless you want to give Tolstoy a run for his money. If you want to teach a course on biophysical chemistry, skip this book and instead cover a few specific topics in depth (e.g. biological redox chemistry, membrane transport, protein folding and dynamics) using reviews and giving links to other fields where appropriate; this is how I learned biophysics and so far it's served me fairly well. If you want to learn biophysical chemistry, there is nothing at all this book can teach you if you already have a good phys chem book and a good biochem book...and by this time you should have both.

While the book covers topics that are extremely relevant to biophysics, we face the regular problem of superficiality, which will diffuse to the readers as it has diffused to the author, in particular, accepting the sombrero model as the most important issue in enzyme catalysis is highly disconcerting. Thus, our issue is not so much with the content of the book, but how it is presented, which is in a way that will be highly misleading to a reader unfamiliar with the field.