Interest in the biological sciences has never been greater. At the dawn of twenty-first century, biology and biochemistry are captivating the minds of young people in the way that physics did 40–50 years ago. There has been a massive shift in public opinion and in the allocation of resources for university-based research. Breakthroughs in genetics, cell biology, and medicine are transforming the way we live, from improving the quality of produce to eradicating disease; they are also stimulating pointed thinking about the origin and meaning of life. Growing awareness of the geometry of life, on length scales extending from an individual organism to a structural element of an individual macromolecule, has led to a reassessment of the principles of design in all the engineering disciplines, including computation. And a few decades after the first determination at atomic resolution of the structures of doublestranded DNA and proteins, it is becoming increasingly apparent that both thermodynamic and structural information are needed to gain a deep sense of the functional properties of biological macromolecules.

This book is about the thermodynamics of living organisms. It was written primarily for undergraduate university students of the biological, biochemical and medical sciences. It could also serve as an introductory text for undergraduate students of chemistry or physics who are interested in biology, and for graduate students of biology or biochemistry who did their first degree in a different subject.