Biologists study life on many different levels. For example, a cellular biologist is concerned with the most basic unit of life, the single cell, whereas an evolutionary biologist may investigate the origin and genealogical history of a particular species of plant or animal life. The molecular biologist is concerned with understanding the biological phenomena of life at the molecular level. Molecular biology is a multifaceted discipline of recent origin, having emerged in the 1980s from the related fields of biochemistry, genetics, and cell biology.

Basic and Applied Research

A molecular biologist might investigate the genetic basis of a disease, analyzing the gene or genes suspected of causing the disease at the molecular level by using the biochemical technique of DNA sequencing. Genes code for proteins; that is, a particular gene contains the molecular information for producing one particular protein. A gene is expressed through the process...