Biological problems have been considered in the context of physics since at least the seventeenth century when e.g. Newton commented on information transmission along nerves. But it was the introduction of the double helix model of DNA, in the middle of the twentieth century, that demonstrating unequivocally that the processes of life are governed by basic physical principles. Since then, an immense number of specialised methods has been developed, applying physics to understand the structures and (to a lesser extent) functions of biomolecules. Zaccai et al. describe a wide variety of these methods in their comprehensive textbook.