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Biophysics is pursued by a complex scientific community. On the one hand, it is a highly interdisciplinary subject and involves many different disciplines: physics and biology as well as chemistry, materials science, bioengineering, pharmacology, physiology, and medicine. On the other hand, this large community is divided up into two subgroups, a large and a small one: Researchers in the large subcommunity apply physical methods in order to study biological systems, as created by the natural processes of life, whereas researchers in the other subcommunity look at biomimetic systems, as synthesized or constructed in the lab, in order to find new physical principles and mechanisms.

This division reflects both the complexity of the systems under consideration and the different traditions in the different disciplines. However, I don’t think that it is particularly useful to emphasize these differences, eg, by distinguishing between ‘biological physics’ and ‘physical biology’. Instead, I would like to focus on the obvious fact that biological and biomimetic systems are intimately related. Indeed, the distinction between these two types of systems has already disappeared on the level of molecules, and I would like to advertise the view that this distinction will eventually disappear on higher levels as well. Thus, as indicated by the title of this editorial, my translation of ‘biophysics’ is the ‘physics of bio-systems’ where the term ‘bio-systems’ is an abbreviation for both biological systems and biomimetic ones.