What is the point of chemical biology?

I am taking a seminar course on chemical biology. Well, it's actually "topics in biochemistry", but every year there is a theme, and this year the theme is chemical biology. We read a couple papers a week and discuss them.

Which leads me to ask--what is the point of chemical biology anyway? All these papers we're reading--especially the ones that self-identify as chemical biology (like Nature Chemical Biology), seem to have these extremely interdisciplinary projects for the sake of...having an extremely interdisciplinary project? A lot of the issues addressed are issues we already have pretty good solutions to (for example, we have a lot of methods for tagging cells and proteins. not that more methods aren't great...but not more methods that have no shot at being as efficient as the ones we already have but are just structurally interesting seem kind of pointless).

The problem I'm finding, is that my interests in different subjects are for different reasons. I like the questions that are posed by molecular biology, and the idea that there are concrete ways to approach these questions in a methodical fashion. What draws me to organic synthesis is the intellectual puzzle of it, as well as that I like to make things (I like making things much more than breaking them apart, which is what you do in biology, but that's another rant). What I like about structural biology that there is a combination of elegance and totally overwhelming complexity in proteins and other biological structures. So, you might say--what if you mash all three together? Shouldn't that be exactly your cup of tea, Connie?

No, not really. The questions posed by chemical biology are boring to me, and the synthesis are buried in the supplemental information if discussed at all. What it basically amounts to, as far as I can tell, is science that is unsatisfying to the molecular biologist and the synthetic chemist in me. And what I do like about it are not the ideas explored and the overall concepts of the papers (well, one was about lipid membrane evolution, and chemical evolution studies are actually pretty cool), but little snippets of sections that were probably done by specialists. Oh, that was a neat series of reactions for the synthesis of n-substituted glycine peptide analogs. Oh that was a cool way to stabilize that protein domain. Oh that's cool that you can stabilize an alpha helix by stapling the end with a Grubbs catalyst.

I mean, isn't it obvious that we are in an interdisciplinary age? Most biomedical labs in particular have an incredible amount of collaboration between specialists. I mean, synthetic organic chemists (supposedly) primarily synthesize compounds with biological relevance (unless they're doing materials science); biology relies on chemical techniques (protein assays, affinity column chromatography, MALDI-TOF MS, etc. etc.). Crystal structures being solved of receptors as well as genetic studies help computational chemists design drugs for the synthetic chemists to make which need to be tested in animals before being put on the market. So what is the point of going out of your way to say "hey! look! look! it's chemical biology! it's chemistry and biology! things are interdisciplinary!" when it's all kind of a natural process anyway? What ends up, as far as I can tell, are a bunch of projects that take really ass-around-your-elbow approaches to problems for the sake of mixing the diciplines, which just seems kind of pointless to me.

Please enlighten me, though, if you think I'm being closed-minded and if there's something I just don't get.