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I found a bio of a professor and it has a sentence as below

Not totally satisfied with the extend and nature of understanding of biological phenomena I could reach via pure experimental approaches, I moved on and turned to ...

I'm not sure what the 'extend' here means, which is a noun. I checked in the Webster dictionary and it does not have a noun form of this word.

For your reference, here is the bio. I hope I don't infringe privacy putting the link here.

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    It's a typo of "extent".
    – CowperKettle
    Commented May 17, 2016 at 3:37
  • @CowperKettle Er, this explanation makes sense, but ...
    – Hua
    Commented May 17, 2016 at 3:43
  • I agree with CowperKettle
    – Senjougahara Hitagi
    Commented May 17, 2016 at 4:54
  • It's a common and quite harmless typo. I met a couple of similar typos in an industrial document I tried to translate some days ago.
    – CowperKettle
    Commented May 17, 2016 at 6:45

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As CowperKettle says, this is almost certainly a typo for "extent".

"Extend" is a verb. We do not normally put an article like "the" in front of a very. "I the ate breakfast"? No. Also "extend and nature" does not make sense. You can put a conjunction between two nouns, and you can put a conjunction between two verbs, but you can't put a conjunction between a verb and a noun.

But "extent" makes perfect sense in context.

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