Book and Media Review pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
Review of Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences, 2nd Edition Hal H. Harris* Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Missouri−St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri 63121, United States Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences, 2nd edition, by Peter Atkins and Julio de Paula. W. H. Freeman and Company: New York, 2011. 590 pp. ISBN 978-1429231145 (cloth). $133.95.
and Biochemical Spectroscopy. The prerequisite mathematical preparation of students is modestjust the fundamental ideas of calculus. Biology majors with a survey of calculus course would be fine with this book. Mathematical support is provided through Mathematical Toolkit sections that are interspersed strategically adjacent to content where they might be applied. These are not lengthy or detailed enough to teach the mathematics ab initio, but they provide useful reminders and reinforcement of prior knowledge. Each chapter ends with a summary of the key concepts and equations, and Discussion Questions designed to provoke written or verbal responses such as could be used for class dialogues. As a physical chemistry instructor, one of the hardest things for me is to develop problems that exemplify and develop the topics I am trying to teach, and are not too difficult for students to do yet are not trivial. In this text, Atkins and de Paula have come up with a rich collection of such problems (usually 40 or more for each chapter) and one to three, longer, more involved multistep Projects that require data to be analyzed. These endof-chapter features are, in my opinion, the best part of the book. However, I must also praise the biologically oriented Case Studies that appear throughout. Few, if any, of these would be found in a typical textbook for chemistry majors. To give you an idea of their nature, some of the topics that appear in just the first section are: Biological Fuels, The Action of Adenosine Triphosphate, Phase Diagrams in the Study of Proteins, The Donnan Equilibrium, ATP and the Biosynthesis of Proteins, Buffer Action in Blood, and Pharmacokinetics. I found these both informative and engaging, and think students would, too. The textbook has significant online support for both students and instructors, including Living Graphs that show the relationships between variables and their related parameters, and Animated Molecules, a utility that provides a visual representation through ChemSpider1 of every molecule mentioned in the text. A separate online-only product, Explorations in Physical Chemistry 2.02 ($30.99 to students) provides Mathcad worksheets, Excel spreadsheets, and exercises. This product supports several of Atkins’ physical chemistry books. Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences can be rented for a year at 60% of the price of the printed book as a CourseSmart eBook.3
hen I read textbooks with titles such as PChem for Biologists, PChem for Engineers, or the like, they seem a little unsatisfying. While it goes without saying that students and professionals who are not chemistry majors must use the concepts and techniques of physical chemistry, it always seems a shame that these generally briefer texts must omit not only some entire topics, but also much of the theoretical justification and logical development of the concepts that students in a longer course “enjoy”. Of course, that is the reason that there is a market for such booksthey serve a very useful purpose for students and instructors who do not have room in their curricula for a course of one year or more that is required of chemistry majors. The current book is only slightly over half as long as a typical textbook for majors. This is a “what you need to know” approach for students of biochemistry and biology. The construction of the textbook for such a course requires deep understanding of both physical chemistry and the related biology and biochemistry, as well as the wisdom to extract the parts that are most likely to be useful to the preparation of a life scientist. In Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences, our guide is physical chemist Peter Atkins, the most prolific textbook author in chemistry who, with his coauthor, Julio de Paula, has created what I consider to be a very successful synthesis. I must disclose that I was one of the reviewers that the publisher asked to comment before publication on a couple of the chapters of the book, but I do not remember my comments being particularly consequential or influential on the resulting product.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Cover image provided by W. H. Freeman and Company and reproduced with permission.
Notes
The authors declare no competing financial interest.
This practical and relatively brief book is presented in 13 chapters arranged in four sections: Biochemical Thermodynamics, The Kinetics of Life Processes, Biomolecular Structure, © 2013 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
Published: July 31, 2013 958
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed400429m | J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 958−959
Journal of Chemical Education
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Book and Media Review
REFERENCES
(1) ChemSpider Homepage. http://www.chemspider.com/ (accessed Jul 2013). (2) Explorations in Physical Chemistry 2.0 Homepage. http://www. whfreeman.com/catalog/Product/explorationsinphysicalchemistry20secondedition-depaula (accessed Jul 2013). (3) CourseSmart Homepage. http://www.coursesmart.com/ (accessed Jul 2013).
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dx.doi.org/10.1021/ed400429m | J. Chem. Educ. 2013, 90, 958−959
