Biology is the study of life in its entirety. The growth of biology as a natural science during
the last 1000 years is interesting from many points of view. One feature of this growth is changing emphasis. Initially it was description of life forms. Identification, nomenclature, classification of all recorded living forms enjoyed the attention of scientists for a long time.
Description of their habitats and (in the case of animals) their behaviour was included in this study. In later years, the focus was physiology and internal morphology or anatomy. Darwinian ideas of evolution by natural selection changed the perception completely. Classical descriptive and clueless biology found a theoretical framework in the evolutionary theory of
Darwin. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Physics and Chemistry were applied to Biology and the new science of Biochemistry soon became the dominant face of biology. On one hand Biochemistry was integrating with Physiology, becoming almost synonymous with it. On the other hand it gave rise to Structural Biology (structure of biomacromolecules), originally called Molecular Biology. The work of Bernal, Pauling, Watson and Crick, Hodgkins, Perutz and Kendrew, Delbruck, Luria, Monod, Beadle and Tatum, Lederberg, Brenner, Benzer, Nirenberg, Khorana, Mclintock, Sanger, Cohen, Boyer, Kornbergs (father and son), Leder, Chambon and scores of
others brought in and established a modern version of Molecular Biology dealing with life processes at molecular level.