Biochemistry and molecular biology:
Foundational discoveries drive major impacts

Biochemists and molecular biologists are pioneers at the forefront of science and medicine, exploring how the building blocks of life work in plants, animals, microbes and other living things. Their work enhances understanding of life at its smallest scale.

Driven by curiosity, ASBMB members ask and then answer questions that yield powerful new knowledge. Their findings are essential building blocks for tomorrow’s medical advances, drugs and other solutions that save and improve lives.

The results of their work are leveraged by others in many life science disciplines, informing advances in brain science, cancer, heart disease, obesity and metabolism and infectious disease, just to name a few.

What is BMB?

While ASBMB researchers all examine molecules and chemical processes that enable life, biochemistry and molecular biology have distinct emphases and approaches.

Biochemistry emerged as a branch of biology when scientists applied the principles of chemistry to biological systems. Biochemists focus on the molecular building blocks of life — the proteins, lipids, sugars and nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA — and the processes that give life to plants, animals and microorganisms.

Molecular biology investigates the structure and function of molecules associated with biological processes, especially those involved in genetic inheritance and protein synthesis. Molecules — made up of atoms — are the smallest units that undergo biochemical reactions.

Scientific wonder and rigor create new knowledge

Biochemists and molecular biologists are motivated by curiosity. They set out to answer the questions “Why?” and “How?” They want to know, for example, why a protein behaves the way it does, how a particular chemical pathway improves or limits a cell’s function, why traits are passed down from generation to generation, how a molecular structure contributes to or prevents disease, and how existing molecules can be leveraged to improve and save lives.

Over centuries, scientists have asked such questions individually and collaboratively. Each generation builds on — and sometimes challenges or even upends — previous understanding. Yet each advance raises more questions to explore, and ASBMB researchers are driven to answer them all.

BMB researchers combine their curiosity with training in and commitment to objectivity, integrity, accountability, rigor and experimental reproducibility. Curiosity makes scientists bold, and their evidence-based decision-making helps ensure science is deliberate.

The outcome is thrilling: Being the first person on the planet with a piece of new knowledge is exciting and inspiring.

Foundational BMB discoveries benefit society

Each new piece of information determined by a basic scientist is, in figurative terms, a new book in a perpetually growing scientific library, which will one day inspire another scientist’s ah-ha moment and their new application and advance.

Just a short list of breakthrough discoveries by BMB scientists that are today transforming human well-being:

• Developing the genome-editing technique CRISPR/Cas9 through research on bacteria, which today has made possible the first potentially curative treatment for sickle cell disease.
• Identifying the existence and function of prions, the abnormal proteins that can cause transmissible neurological disorders, which today is helping to understand and prevent conditions such as mad cow disease.
• Illuminating the biochemical elements necessary to create genomic sequencing and PCR testing through research on bacteria, which sparked the genomic medicine revolution and today rapidly tracks the evolution and public health risks of viruses.
• Harnessing lipid nanoparticles and mRNA technologies, which enabled the historically rapid development of an effective COVID-19 vaccine.
• Driving fundamental understanding of the peptide hormone GLP-1, which is today the foundation for novel drugs treating diabetes, obesity and heart disease.
• Understanding how proteins fold, which today is driving new understanding of neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Working together, we power progress

The advances above required decades of fundamental investigation and required long-term, sustained investments. This is why the national agencies that fund basic science, such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation in the U.S. (and similar agencies worldwide), must have robust, continuous bipartisan support.

Later-stage investments by biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies enable foundational findings to be subsequently translated into drugs and therapies that are tested during clinical trials and approved for public use.

All of us are essential contributors to this pipeline of progress. Researchers, such as biochemists and molecular biologists, translational and clinical scientists, the private sector and the public are all partners who advance and realize the full potential of scientific discovery.

Working separately and together, we power the engine that produces new scientific knowledge and better outcomes for patients, families and communities worldwide.