Plus ça change...

Some years ago, a brave man asked a brave question: ‘What is biochemistry?’ This man is our departing Editor-in-Chief, Tim Hunt. He felt that part of the difficulty in defining biochemistry is that it ‘...has been so successful that it now encompasses everything...’ and so ‘...scarcely exists as a coherent “subject” anymore.’ Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. As Tim's weighty mantle comes to rest upon my shoulders, I think hard about TiBS and I find that Tim's question – ‘What is biochemistry?’ – still haunts me. Each time I reach out to grasp a clear answer, it slips away.It is an old question, and Tim's quotations from essays written by J.B.S. Haldane and Joseph Needham in 1937 clearly demonstrate this. The essays were written to honor Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins – ‘Hoppie’ – on his seventy-fifth birthday. However, Hopkins himself was a quite prolific writer and, particularly after he shared the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Christiaan Eijkman, was called upon to give prestigious lectures and addresses. One of these was delivered in his role as President of the British Association at the Association's annual meeting, held at Leceister, UK in 1933.Hopkins’ answer to Tim's question was: ‘By its [biochemistry's] essential or ultimate aim, I myself mean an adequate and acceptable description of molecular dynamics in living cells and tissues.’ Hopkins would, I am sure, be delighted if he could see how far his successors have progressed towards what he regarded as biochemistry's goal. He would have been thrilled by the data coming from analyses of gene expression using chips, for what are these data revealing if not a first step in the ‘molecular dynamics in living cells and tissues’? It is, of course, only a first step. We need to know what proteins are synthesized from those differentially expressed RNAs, what they do and in which pathways they function. If chips are molecular biology, then the subsequent steps must be biochemistry. Indeed, Arthur Kornberg, who is not an impartial witness when it comes to testifying on the importance of biochemistry, believes that already ‘...the essence of molecular biology as it is currently practiced is biochemistry.'It seems to me that this will increasingly be the case as we move from gene expression patterns to the expressed proteins themselves and their interactions.The boundaries between cell biology and biochemistry are also becoming blurred. With new techniques for imaging fluorescently labeled molecules, cell biologists are looking at the dynamics of molecules in living cells, rather than their distribution at the moment when the cell was fixed. For example, research into the processing and movements of mRNA molecules provide a fascinating example of the extension of cell biology into biochemistry.Hopkins too saw this, as expressed in a remarkable lecture to the London Natural History Society on the occasion of his election as Honorary President in 1936. (Hopkins felt a strong affinity with naturalists; his first research work was on the pigments of butterfly wings.) He wrote: ‘As the exploration of function progresses, chemical problems are bound to arise, and the biochemist may claim the right to intrude.’ However, I do not think that Hopkins could have predicted the extent to which, rather than biochemists intruding, other biologists are adopting biochemical strategies and practices. That is, as the various biologists – molecular, cellular and developmental – come searching for function and mechanism they will ‘become’ biochemists.What does this mean for TiBS? It means, I think, that TiBS will cover an increasingly diverse range of topics as experimental biologists turn to biochemical techniques and strategies to determine function. As Hopkins put it in his British Association address: ‘Such data and such modes of thought as it [biochemistry] is now providing are pervasive, and must appear as aspects in all biological thought.’ There is every reason to believe that biochemistry, after a period in the shadows of molecular this and that, is moving increasingly to take center stage and TiBS will be here to provide us with the best coverage of the best research.