Introduction: Biological Systems and Physical Approaches

In January 1999, at the dawn of the new millennium, Time Magazine devoted the majority of its coverage to a special issue entitled “The Future of Medicine.” The cover story began as follows: “Ring farewell to the century of physics, the one in which we split the atom and turned silicon into computing power. It’s time to ring in the century of biotechnology.” Despite the tremendous importance of life science and biotechnology nowadays as the above statements proclaim, at this stage their knowledge appears to be largely phenomenological, and thus undeniably calls for fundamental and quantitative understandings of the complex phenomena. It will be timely to ring in the century of a new physical science to meet this challenge.