Acutely aware that the division of science into disciplinary pigeonholes was an arbitrary administrative artifice, Frank was convinced that it did great harm by creating barriers for heuristically fertile communication. In particular, he fervently believed in the need for a cross-disciplinary perspective in order to find physical solutions to biological problems, and thus he became a leader in the effort to broaden and reformulate the nascent interdisciplinary field of biophysics. In 1955 the National Institutes of Health officially recognized that field by establishing a Biophysics Study Section with Frank as its first chairman. To limn the contours and define the content of biophysics, Frank organized a four-week-long conference in the summer of 1958, the Intensive Study Program in Biophysics, held at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Some 200 biologists, chemists, physicists, psychologists, and engineers came to Boulder to attend formal and informal lectures, seminars, and discussions on subjects ranging from the molecules of life to whole organisms. The published proceedings of that conference, Biophysical Science: A Study Program, provided a conceptual foundation and research agenda for the new field. The success of this experiment on the cross-disciplinary exchange of information, for which Frank's involvement in planning and implementation had been the crucial factor, made so strong an impression on him that he would use this model again to assist in the birth of neuroscience.

As the years went by, the nervous system came to dominate Frank's theoretical and practical research interests to an ever greater degree. In the late 1930s, continuing the work he had begun as a graduate student under Erlanger and Gasser in St. Louis, Frank pioneered the use of the giant axon of the squid for the study of the action potential and nerve impulse conduction. The British zoologist John Z. Young, whom he met while doing postgraduate work at