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Physical chemistry is one of the toughest topics most biology undergraduates face but also arguably the most important. It takes a very talented teacher to lead a student to understand that the things that really interest him or her (cancer, nutrition, sports physiology, development, immunity, adaptation, etc.) can only be understood at a deep level if one can get a grip on issues like affinity, reaction kinetics, bonding, and so on, which lie in the dry and dusty domain of physical chemistry. Only a talented teacher can lead the student horse to the phys. chem. water, but even she will need help to induce the student to drink deeply. This is where a really good text book comes in. There are many excellent textbooks on physical chemistry, many of them written by Atkins (Chang being his main rival). The problem generally is that they are written from a chemist's, not a biologists perspective and, however good in principle, they don't engage the biologists interest, deal too much with abstractions like ideal gases, and aren’t easy to turn to for information useful to a biologist, even as reference works. A book that nearly does the job is Price et al (OUP ISBN 0198792816) but it has a few gaps and weaknesses and doesn’t really come up to the standard demanded by today’s students. Atkins has teamed up with Julio de Paula and a galaxy of teachers from mainly US undergraduate schools to provide an answer to this need. Using every modern method to allow the reader to scan, dip and plunge progressively into the topics (illustrations, examples, derivations, case studies, self-tests, exercises and projects plus a web site with interactive, equation-driven graphs (most of which work!) this text will help students get an answer to their question that goes as deep as they need at the time. The book is pretty comprehensive, with particularly good sections on biological structures and the physical methods used to determine them, chemical kinetics and relevance to metabolism, and transport across membranes. Even in such a model text, however, there are gaps that ought to be filled in the next edition. I should like to have seen a bit more about how the principles of photochemistry are used in modern, quantitative microscopy, for example, and a much fuller account of affinity and specificity in biomolecular interactions. Nevertheless, I have no hesitation in recommending this as the best reference work for life scientists intent on getting to grips with the molecular sciences underlying their discipline. As a bonus, it is an attractively produced, wipe-clean hard cover at a very competitive price.
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