ICTS

Once every ten years, the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine survey the state of physics research.  To make the task manageable, it is broken into separate volumes on astrophysics, condensed matter physics, etc..  In this cycle, for the first time, biological physics stands alongside these more traditional divisions of our subject.  This marks the emergence of biological physics as a genuine branch of  physics, not the application of physics to biology or an interdisciplinary amalgam. In this talk I will try to convey what we learned about the exciting state of the field today, the historical context out of which the field has emerged, and the challenges we face going forward.