DeFelice presents this intricate subject in an easy-to-follow, stepwise fashion: he reviews the fundamentals of electricity; transfers those principles to a biological context; and expands the discussion to encompass the subject's practical dimensions. Clear definitions and intuitive descriptions characterize the presentation, which is complemented by over 150 drawings and graphs. Mathematics is kept to the minimum necessary. The text covers both excitable and non-excitable membranes and includes the plasma membrane as well as intracellular membranes.
A unique, electronics-made-simple'...

I started working on membrane noise in 1967 with David Firth in the Department of Physiology at McGill University. I began writing this book in the summer of 1975 at Emory University under a grant from the National Library of Medicine. Part of the writing was also done at the Marine Biological Laboratory Library in Woods Hole and in the Library of the Stazione Zoologica in Naples. I wrote this book because in the intervening years membrane noise became a definable subdivision of membrane biophysics and seemed to deserve a uniform treatment in one volume. Not surprisingly, this turned out to...