Ask a question about how the human immune system fights a tropical disease, or how viruses like HIV use genetic tricks to resist drugs, or how plant cells capture light, or how Alzheimer's takes hold in the brain, or how we can better fight diseases like cancer, or why some sperm cells are fertile while others are not, and you may have to narrow your gaze to the nanoscale to find answers. Ask a thousand such questions, and each time your attention may return to that same place: the hidden molecular world, where chemicals and DNA and proteins reign supreme.
There -- where molecules bond and break, interfere and interact, regulate and run amok -- that's where your answers may lie. Though too small to see with the eyes alone, this micro world is a massive domain of discovery for biophysics, a major interdisciplinary field that stretches across all the fields of science and medicine and brings together researchers who focus on unweaving those intricate interacting webs of molecules to find answers about human health and all the diseases that plague humankind.
Journalists are invited to discover the world of biophysics later this month in San Francisco, when the largest gathering of biophysicists in the world convenes from February 15-19 at the Moscone Center on Howard Street for the 58th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society.
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