Editorial - Thoughts About Biology

Abstract

Everything expands and changes and so does our knowledge of biology. Everybody says that this is so. Even though I have been a biologist only 30 years, still I have myself seen sufficient change in our science to be assured that such change is in fact taking place. In the first place we have learned a lot of plain old facts: How respiration works, a lot about how photosynthesis works (but not all), a lot about how all the different amino acids get made, a lot about what hormones there are, a little about how hormones work, a lot about the description of how development takes place, a great deal about genetic material. We have seen enough to convince me that there is one great class of biological problems which, if followed to its ultimate lair, turns out to be biochemistry. They are problems which ultimately revolve around the path of carbon, the isolation of enzymes, etc., etc. I think this is true of much of genetics, all of physiology, much of embryology, much of ecology, and, in a sense, of morphology and anatomy. These disciplines all deal with things that turn upon molecules and chemistry in a rather direct way. We know, for example, that to discover how a gene does what it does, all we have to do is find out what enzyme it causes to be made and then find out what that enzyme does.

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