On Chemical Biology

So I think I mentioned earlier that I'm pretty sure I don't want to go into traditional biochemistry or structural biology because it's not exactly biology-meets-chemistry, it's kind of it's own thing. Here's excerpts from a PDF that I found on the UCSF website somewhere on one of their chemical biology pages:

Is there a problem?
Chemistry is a very mature science compared to biology.
Chemistry graduates continue to grow overall but at modest rates compared to biology graduates. What is making this happen?

...

What is Chemical Biology?
A paradigm shift in allowing scientists systematic access to chemical tools to probe important problems in biology.
It is not the same as biochemistry which uses chemical principles to probe biological molecules.
It is not the same as chemistry which is focused on synthesis and properties of small molecules.
It is not the same as molecular biology which modifies biomolecules to probe cells.

...

"It is different than molecular biology with the use of small molecules to probe biology offering numerous advantages to gene knockout and siRNA knock- downs, the modern tools used by molecular biologists. Proteins contain multiple functional sites and these"ablative tools" do not allow one to dissect individual functions. Moreover, cell signaling events occur quickly often with time-scales on the order of minutes. siRNA usually requires >24 hours to have its maximal effect and even then it usually only ablates 60-80% of the protein. Gene knockouts represent constitutive inactivation, unlike the acute inactivation that can be generated by a small molecule. Not surprisingly these different probes often generated different results. Small molecules represent rapid and dose-dependent probes of cellular function and the information that is generated is more relevant to drug discovery."

This is all very appealing to me. I'm all about small molecules and how they apply to biological systems. That, in my mind, is chemistry-meets-biology. I guess my main problem was that I read a lot of chemical biology papers that felt very...artificial. I think I describe it as "interdisciplinary for the sake of being interdisciplinary rather than having a point" somewhere on this blog, if not, if you know me in person those words definitely have come out of my mouth.

But I guess a lot of that has to do with the fact that trying to define chemical biology as a field is pretty new. I mean, the essence of what it is has been around for a long time called by different names. There has always been a chemistry-biology interface and medicinal chemistry has always been on it; this isn't exactly new. But defining this interface as a true discipline is, and trying to work more on the interplay between in vitro and in vivo with small molecules is definitely new.

I just need to find a corner of it that I feel like has a point and not, like, spend my life making aptamers that will never ever compete with real antibodies unless I find them to be extremely structurally interesting. Not that that is exactly a waste of time per say, just it doesn't seem satisfying to me. There's a lot of room to grow in this discipline, and I think interdisciplinary science is the way of the future.