When some people (including myself, at one point) think of the worlds of medicine and physics, they see them as distinctly different spheres with very little commonality. Medicine is often associated with rapidly-expanding advancements in genetics and genomics, experimental findings in pathophysiology, as well as the constant testing of new candidates with potential for pharmaceutical applications. Naturally, these aspects just scratch the tip of the iceberg of both what the scientific community has already discovered in medicine and the vast unknown of what still lies to be discovered. However, when people think of physics, it may be seen in a more one-dimensional view: as a subject that serves to explain the physical aspects of the world around us. For example, two metal balls of equal mass rolling down an inclined plane and then through a vertical circle where they experience gravitation, or a golf ball that is hit from the ground and follows a parabolic trajectory where its velocity is calculated at each moment in time.
Even though physics may deal with these kinds of physical unknowns that peak people’s intellectual curiosities, whereas medical sciences focus on the invisible, cellular workings of ourselves and the world around us, there is a common binding between these two subjects. The principles and laws of physics are everywhere around us, and human civilizations will go through nothing short of physics and all other forms of sciences to achieve societal advancements. Physics serves a role in specifically the pathophysiology of medicine that I think some people do not appreciate. And for centuries, physics and medicine have always been integrated under the single field of knowledge known as natural science. Calculating the velocity of a chemical message carried by a protein allows researchers to optimize medical treatments for patients suffering from diseases such as Alzheimer’s, where the patient’s numbers of neurotransmitters decrease. In electrophysiology – the study of the electrical properties of cells and tissues – individuals who work in a hospital setting utilize knowledge of electric current and voltage changes to assist patients suffering from certain heart rhythm disorders. The application of physics extends uniformly across all vicinities of the medical field, including in the developments of biomedical technologies that fortunately, we have today, such as MRIs, X-rays, fiber optic scopes, and electric stimulation during physical therapy.
There is a classic saying that without mathematics, science would not exist and proportionally, without science, mathematics would not be everywhere around us. I think that the same can be said about physics and medicine because both scientific fields concentrate on distinctive, but complementary roles in achieving advancement. Without physics, hospitals would not have the technologies they have today to serve patients. Without medicine, physics would not go into the intricate and invisible realm of cells, and help explain why biological or chemical processes in species happen. There would not be the grander question of “so what would we use this knowledge for?”
The emergence of new diseases and illnesses consistently requires new forms of diagnosis and treatment, so this urgency pushes both the doctor and the physicist to synthesize and upgrade current medical treatments. These two individuals are able to achieve such novel advancements and get human civilization to achieve bigger and greater ambitions because they both excel in two different specialties that complement each other. This is where the meaning of collaboration comes into its true form. Many people may argue that collaboration is simply just working together with others, and each individual applies an opposite, but equal amount of work toward the project. And from there, the principles of credibility and accuracy of work establish themselves. However, I am a strong proponent of the belief that collaboration is about completing and advancing work with individuals who specialize in different fields and because of that, regardless of the difficulty of the endeavor taken on, such individuals are able to work together harmoniously and smoothly because they each handle a part of the project in an area that they specialize in. For example, the development of mass spectrophotometry – an analytical technique utilized to quantitatively measure the mass-to-charge ratio of ions – has revolutionized the field of medicine. This has been the work of countless scientific and mathematical minds over the course of centuries, beginning with British physicist, J.J. Thomson, who first discovered the electron and then developed the cathode ray tube which measured the deflection of ions in a magnetic field. More recently, in 2002, scientist Koichi Tanaka developed laser desorption ionization which allowed him to analyze large proteins from solid samples. The collective works of all of the scientists who worked on mass spectrophotometry have allowed this technique to be used in medicine, wherein new biomarkers are used to indicate the presence or advancement of a disease, in pharmacokinetics to study drug absorption, in diagnostic laboratories for identifying infections and metabolic disorders, et cetera.
Therefore, even though physics and medicine may seem as such opposites at first glance, they do work together to form wonders for society. More broadly, this is a form of what collaboration truly means – when individuals with different specialities work together to delegate projects, despite their difficulty, and make new and novel advancements. This is the crucial way that society will continue to evolve and advance, and these forms of collaboration are the works of thousands and thousands of minds.
