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 be much more difficult than
I had imagined and some areas of the subject that ought to be included
have been left out, either for reasons of space or because of my own
inability to keep up with all aspects of the field. This book is written
for biologists interested in noise and for physicists and electrical
engineers interested in biology. The first three chapters attempt to
bring both groups to a common point of understanding of electronics and
electrophysiology necessary to the study of noise and impedance in
membranes. These chapters arose out of a course given over a period of
six years to electrical engineers from the Georgia Institute of
Technology and biologists from Emory University School of Medicine.