Advertisement

If you have an ACS member number, please enter it here so we can link this account to your membership. (optional)

ACS values your privacy. By submitting your information, you are gaining access to C&EN and subscribing to our weekly newsletter. We use the information you provide to make your reading experience better, and we will never sell your data to third party members.

ENJOY UNLIMITED ACCES TO C&EN

People

Roots Of Chemical Biology

December 3, 2007 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 85, Issue 49

Stu Borman's article on chemical biology (C&EN, Oct. 1, page 31) raises questions about the provenance and meaning of chemical biology. To a degree, these were answered in an editorial by Madeleine Jacobs on the occasion of the department name change at Cornell University (C&EN, Sept. 21, 1998, page 5). Jacobs mentioned Stevens Institute of Technology, but the program at Stevens was inaugurated many years before Stevens' chemistry department changed its name.

I joined Stevens Institute in 1978, fresh from a Ph.D. and postdoc in neurophysiology from Columbia University's College of Physicians & Surgeons, for the expressed purpose of teaching in and guiding the formation of the new biology program. The program was originally conceived by S. S. Stivala and A. K. Bose (both chemists, now emeritus), but F. T. Jones actually brought it into being in 1978. It was an undergraduate program leading to the B.S. and was initially called "modern biology."

About two years later, when it was apparent that industry had failed to appreciate the difference between a traditional biology program and our modern biology program, we changed the name to chemical biology, and our graduates got more respect—and higher salaries! The success of the undergraduate program and its graduates—in industry, medicine, and research—encouraged us to expand chemical biology into graduate study to the M.S. and ultimately the Ph.D levels. But we may still have one of the few undergraduate programs in chemical biology.

I take issue, though, with the statement in Borman's article that chemical biology has to do with small molecules. Our original definition of chemical biology is still true today: Chemical biology is those areas of biology which rely on or can be explained by chemistry. We did not use "molecular biology" because that name had come to be associated mostly with DNA. The impact of chemistry on biology over the past 50 years has been enormous. But the impact of biology on chemistry has also been significant. To name just a few of the many examples, the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Kary Mullis for polymerase chain reaction, the indispensable tool of every biologist today, and the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Roger Kornberg for the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription.

Nuran M. Kumbaraci
Hoboken, N.J.

I read with interest the article on "Chemical Biology" about the speculations on where, when, and by whom the term was coined. I would like to alert you to the fact that it likely dates much further back than Konrad Bloch in the 1970s.

I vividly recollect having posed for a picture in 1999 in front of the Norman W. Church Building for Chemical Biology on the Caltech campus with my dad, who happened to work there in 1956 with Linus Pauling. The architect's drawing of the building dating from 1953, with its name barely but surely visible, is on the Oregon State University website dedicated to Pauling's memory (osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/blood/pictures/large-science11.088.16-norman-1953.html).

This tells me that the building and also the term chemical biology must date back even further. I wouldn't be surprised should it turn out that the venerable Pauling is at the origin of this terminology, in light of his research into several proteins, hemoglobin and the like, but this remains a subject for further investigation.

Jens Hasserodt
Lyon, France

Article:

This article has been sent to the following recipient:

0 /1 FREE ARTICLES LEFT THIS MONTH Remaining
Chemistry matters. Join us to get the news you need.