When I was an undergraduate starting out on my Biology major, I didn’t have any preconceived notions about what branch of the life sciences I might ultimately favor. Oberlin College offered only a liberal arts degree in Biology \u2013 not only was it impossible to specialize further, but students were encouraged to explore the whole spectrum of biology from Anatomy to Zoology (and required to take many credits outside of the sciences altogether, for which I am still grateful). <\/p>\n
\nAlthough I enjoyed my ‘macro’ courses in population genetics, evolution, ecology, botany and the like, I quickly fell in love with the molecular world. Working my way through classes with names such as Molecular Genetics, Genetics, Molecular Biology, Microbiology, Immunology, Virology and Biochemistry, at first I just saw them as complementary studies that both overlapped and differed in interesting ways. It was my parents, though, who caused me to question the nomenclature of the various subdisciplines of biology: they wanted to know, simply enough, what I was<\/em>, so they could tell their neighbors and friends what their daughter was shaping up to be.<\/p>\n \nWhen they first asked, I told them that I wanted to be a molecular geneticist<\/em>. This was probably because at the time, I was embroiled in a course by the same name and humming with the history of the Phage Group, the lac operon and everything that happened afterwards. The following year, I decided I was a molecular biologist<\/em>, for equally opportunistic reasons. But ultimately the term virologist<\/em> won out. Although I studied viruses in graduate school, it was in a department called Microbiology<\/em>. I abandoned viruses in my first post-doc, and so suddenly found myself in need of a new name: cell biologist<\/em> seemed the most appropriate for the cancer cell signalling I was investigating, although I didn’t do a lot with whole, intact cells. Later when I went back to viruses, I was doing more biochemistry than anything else, so all pretence at classification slipped away. <\/p>\n \nSomewhere during this ten-year span, something very intriguing was happening with the nomenclature of biological subdisciplines. In earlier days, there wasn’t much mixing. Biochemists studied proteins, often in isolation from cells; cell biologists did the reverse. Molecular biologists performed a lot of cloning, studying how proteins interacted with nucleic acid to turn genes on and off. Geneticists used model organisms to study processes with only scanty reference to the fact that proteins were actually carrying things out: genes were ‘upstream’ or ‘downstream’, they ‘enhanced’ or ‘suppressed’ \u2013 but when I listened to geneticists giving seminars, it seemed they had little interest in what their gene products were actually doing<\/em> in cells \u2013 questions about binding partners, localization, even predicted structures and domains, were often greeted with a disinterested shrug.<\/p>\n \nBut at some point, the boundaries started to blur: disciplines had become tools and techniques, almost without anyone noticing. Geneticists were isolating proteins from their animals, and cloning constructs to make transgenics; cell biologists were using the methods of biochemistry to get a handle on how signalling influenced physical forms, or making a knockout mouse to discover the consequences of their pet gene’s absence in vivo, or dabbling in computational biology or bioinformatics to gain added insights. Soon, no self-respecting biologist wouldn’t be mixing the methods of most of the previous inviolate subdisciplines, matching technique to objective instead of forcing objectives into a limited set of traditional techniques. <\/p>\n \nAnd when that happened, all the old names went out the window. Biochemistry used to be synonymous with enzyme kinetics; now it’s also a suite of techniques that everyone does: Western blot, immunoprecipitation, proteomics, kinase assays. Molecular biology is just a plasmid workhorse, a means to another end. I have noticed that, hand in hand with these changes, academic departments have been discreetly changing their names. Descriptive terms like Anatomy<\/em> and Embryology<\/em> have been phased out. Some departments attempted to deal with the blurring of boundaries by merging discipline names: Cell and Molecular Biology; Biochemistry and Cell Biology; Cell and Developmental Biology; Structural Biology and Biophysics \u2013 you can find all the permutations, uneasily shoulder-to-shoulder and not quite sure exactly what they stand for. As the following promotional blurb from UCL’s Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology demonstrates, any pretence at true compartmentalization seems to have been lost:<\/p>\n \nThe structural biology of proteins and enzymes to the mechanism of amphibian limb regeneration; from the regulation of transcription of genes involved in drug metabolism to the uncovering of gene function in Mycobacterium tuberculosis<\/em>; from understanding the signalling of insulin receptors to the computer analysis of whole genomes sequences, this department provides an exciting venue in which to realise the promise of these important goals.<\/span>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \nI still don’t know what to call myself. When pressed, I usually mumble cell biologist<\/em>, but it never feels quite right \u2013 especially as I infinitely prefer biochemistry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I was an undergraduate starting out on my Biology major, I didn’t have any preconceived notions about what branch of the life sciences I might ultimately favor. Oberlin College offered only a liberal arts degree in Biology \u2013 not … Continue reading