Chemical Biology: Here to Stay?

Abstract

The term chemical biology emerged about 25 years ago and encompasses a set of research inquiries at the intersections of chemistry and biology. Before chemical biology there was biological chemistry for 100 years or more, but the traverse from one to the other has not just been a switching of noun and adjective. Over the past quarter century chemists, many from organic synthetic lineages, have become convinced that the open systems of biology have become appropriate venues to bring chemical thinking for library design, screening, and molecular scaffold optimization. Whereas biological chemistry may be described as the universe of chemistry that happens in nature, chemical biologists often bring new, unnatural molecular scaffolds to decipher the logics of biology. That seems a limiting definition and I prefer the mantra: think chemically, act biologically.