The Rise of New Scientific Fields of Study from Established Disciplines

Abstract

Modern biochemistry is an evolutionary product which resulted from the amalgamation of three major disciplines of science, namely, organic chemistry, biology, and medicine (physiology) during the late nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century. Its mission was then as it is today: ‘to explore and study the chemical and physicochemical processes and properties of living cells and their constituents’. The driving forces for its creation were primarily scientific, but not less important, historic-philosophic and socio-economic driven by scientists, physicians, agriculturists and industrialists. During the last two centuries the establishment of biochemical sciences not only involved changes in names and with it the shift of emphasis and focus of their research directions but also the intensity of educating new generations of biochemists and others in the life and health sciences as well as the contribution to practical and applied objectives. It started out as chemistry and moved through organic chemistry and medical chemistry to physiological chemistry and to biochemistry or biological chemistry. By the mid 1950s biochemistry was already an established discipline and offshoots such as molecular biology and biophysics began to emerge. In analogy MMT, an emerging new intellectual space that links disciplines in the management field to the field of health care and medical technology, seems to follow similar patterns in terms of the philosophy, the driving forces, the requirements for research, problem solving, teaching programs and practical aspects and, to some degree, even the participants.