This text is designed for a first course in biological mass transport, and the material in it is presented at a level that is appropriate to advanced undergraduates or early graduate level students. Its orientation is somewhat more physical and mathematical than a biology or standard physiology text, reflecting its origins in a transport course that I teach to undergraduate (and occasional graduate) biomedical engineering students in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins. The audience for my cours- and presumably for this text - also includes chemical engineering undergraduates concentrating in biotechnology, and graduate students in biophysics. The organization of this book differs from most texts that at tempt to present an engineering approach to biological transport. What distinguishes biological transport from other mass transfer processes is the fact that biological transport is biological. Thus, we do not start with the engineering principles of mass transport (which are well presented elsewhere) and then seek biological ap plications of these principles; rather, we begin with the biological processes themselves, and then develop the tools that are needed to describe them. As a result, more physiology is presented in this text than is often found in books dealing with engineering applica tions in the life sciences.
Focus, Organization, and Content This book, like the first edition, deals with the mass transport processes that take place in living systems, with a focus on the normal behavior of eukaryotic cells and the - ganisms they constitute, in their normal physiological environment. As a consequence of this focus, the structure and content of the book differ from those of traditional transport texts. We do not start with the engineering principles of mass transport (which are well presented elsewhere) and then seek biological applications of these principles; rather, we begin with the biological processes themselves, and then - velop the models and analytical tools that are needed to describe them. This approach has several consequences. First of all, it drives the content of the text in a direction distinctively different from conventional transport texts. This is - cause the tools and models needed to describe complex biological processes are often different from those employed to describe more well-characterized inanimate systems. Many biological processes must still be described phenomenologically, using me- odologies like nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Simple electrical analogs employing a paucity of parameters can be more useful for characterization and prediction than complex theories based on the behavior of more well-defined systems on a laboratory bench. By allowing the biology to drive the choice of analysis tools and models, the latter are consistently presented in the context of real biological systems, and analysis and biology are interwoven throughout.
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