Science Evolution

The twenty-first century will do for biology what the nineteenth did for physics. Today, biology is poised to deliver many new discoveries pollinated by insights and tools gleaned from physics, computer science and engineering. We think of living cells as biochemical factories, but they’re also mechanical objects subject to the laws of physics, and the structures they form are also engineering marvels. When you cut yourself, the healing wound (pictured) begins a process akin to what happens on a building site. Civil engineers used computers to model how mechanical stresses and strains in the wound forced epithelial cells (stained blue) to crawl (red) and to form a ring (yellow) along the wound rim that contracted like a closing iris or a drawstring on a purse. This knowledge could be used to hinder the spread of cancer cells and heal defects and lesions caused by diseases like spina bifida or diabetes.

Written by Tristan Farrow

Tristan Farrow

Writer

British Science Association Media Fellow. He holds a degree in quantum physics from the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellowship in quantum effects in biology.

• Image by Ester Anon and colleagues
• Université Paris Diderot, France
• Copyright held by Nature Publishing Group
• Research published in Nature Physics, August 2014