The physicists are getting rather jubilant over the selection of Nobel Prize winner Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy. Sure he's the Director of LBNL. Sure, he has a Nobel Prize in something involving lasers (ho hum - I don't know any physicists that don't work with lasers). But I'd like to point out that he also has a cross-appointment at my old stomping grounds, Berkeley's Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. And he's like the father of optical tweezers (for which he won the 1995 "Science for Art" Prize!) So we biologists should be a little smug too!
I will not exploit this opportunity to get into the eternal questions [1] which is harder, biology or physics and [2] why do physicists so frequently move into biology during their careers. Seriously. So not going there.
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Hmmm I would very much class optical tweezers as a physics thing...which has very usefull applications to biology.
Signed: Physicist who does not work with lasers (but ok I am only a theoretician).
Quite a number of scientists, including at least one of my classmates, have gotten molecular biology degrees in the past decade for work with optical tweezers; you could argue they're indispensable for studies of single-molecule DNA dynamics. Sure it's a "physics thing" - but you could equally well say DNA purification and PCR are chemistry things. It's really not about where your tools came from, it's about what you do with them, and for the purpose of understanding what system.