Biology:Biochemistry vs. Chemistry

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

You can argue that biochem is "just a specialization of chemistry". But by that logic all GURPS skills are just specializations of Physics.

Really, everything is just mathematics when you get down to it :)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Really, everything is just mathematics when you get down to it :)

Naah. I learned better when I tried to take upper division engineering courses without having taken the lower division physics that was the prereq. I figured that I understood the math perfectly well, you see. Then I was asking, "What's a free body diagram?"

You might just as well say that everything is language. If you know the symbolism that's used to describe stuff then obviously you know the stuff. . . .

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

You can argue that biochem is "just a specialization of chemistry". But by that logic all GURPS skills are just specializations of Physics.

It's a case of emergent behavior. The higher layer of behavior follows its own rules that are worthy of independent study. And while knowledge of the underlying layer might inform your knowledge of how the higher behaves, you don't normally think of it on that level of detail; nor can an expert in the lower layer automatically predict and understand the behavior of the higher layer.

So Biochemistry is a subset of Biology, but never Chemistry, in Gurps terms?

It's just that even on real world earth, life includes some really weird chemistry like extremophiles thriving in pH below 1, and above 10, using oxidizers other than oxygen, etc.
In alien/alternate reality worlds, the possibilites really start covering what everyone here implies fits general Chemistry. If so, then would those no longer fit Biology?
Sorry if my failure to understand what seems near obvious to everyone else.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

So Biochemistry is a subset of Biology, but never Chemistry, in Gurps terms?

That, surely, is pretty clear from Characters?

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It's just that even on real world earth, life includes some really weird chemistry like extremophiles thriving in pH below 1, and above 10, using oxidizers other than oxygen, etc.
In alien/alternate reality worlds, the possibilites really start covering what everyone here implies fits general Chemistry. If so, then would those no longer fit Biology?
Sorry if my failure to understand what seems near obvious to everyone else.

Remember that Biology has a mandatory specialization by planet type. Which really is an intermediate-realism stand-in for trees of life with major underlying similarities.

I'm not sure what you're thinking the boundary between biochemistry and chemistry is, but I don't think there's much risk of exotic biologies approaching it. Even very exotic life almost certainly will be built around some kind of complex macromolecules that perform catalytic, control, and structural roles. That's what biochemists would study. What the particular composition or of those macromolecules is really has nothing to do with defining the skill.

[Flyndaran]

It might help me understand things if people used examples of what in setting feats would require one or the other.
What killed this guy would fall under Biochemistry regardless of the actual toxin, right?
Lab production of substance X would fall under Chemistry unless it's specifically via coaxing living organisms, right?

[Anaraxes]

"What killed this guy" in the context of chemicals would be Poisons. RAW gives a default to Chemistry there, as well as Pharmacy and Physician. You might allow a Biochem default as well. Forensics is going to be useful to get to the point where you would suspect a poison, as might Surgery for an autopsy.

For lab production of Substance X, it would depend on what Substance X was. A biochemist might be better at synthesizing an enzyme, hormone, DNA, etc, than an inorganic chemist. There's also Bioengineering if you're planning on mass producing (say) insulin from genetically engineered bacteria.

Biochem is concerned with molecules that are important in living organisms: lipids, carbohydrates -> polymers like cellulose, starch, glycogen; amino acids -> proteins; nucleotides -> RNA / DNA. The lower boundary here crosses over with organic chemistry. The upper boundary crosses over with cellular biology (membranes and their transport mechanisms, construction of organelles) and molecular biology (DNA transcription, protein synthesis and folding).

Organic chemistry is carbon chemistry, which isn't necessarily tied to living biochemical systems (though once upon at time that was the main known source of such compounds; hence the name). Hydrocarbons, alkanes and carbon rings, alkenes, alkynes, alcohols, aromatics (benzene, etc), carbonyl compounds, stereochemistry, chirality and enantiomers, isomers.

RAW tucks Biochem under Biology, which fits with a number of university department organizations (UC Berkeley, for one). I wouldn't expect many biologists to know a lot of biochem, so an optional specialty may be a bit generous. But in most games, that won't really come up a lot.

Just as realistic warriors have more than one weapon skill, realistic scientists have more than one science skill. A biochemist studied inorganic and organic chem at some point, and probably even remembers some of it in addition to the part that's not directly relevant to biochem. An inorganic chemist is going to have heard of sucrose, even if that's really important to biochemists. There aren't hard walls between the disciplines. Rather than try to pigeonhole every topic into exactly one skill, you'd probably be better off with a sliding scale of familiarity penalties.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Sorry if my failure to understand what seems near obvious to everyone else.

For me the problem is that you're making a serious effort to make sense of it in terms of what the terms mean in the real world. The GURPS skills aren't very representative of the real world; they're gamable approximations. I mean, in a system where you have separate skills for knife, shortsword, broadsword, two-handed sword, main-gauche, rapier, smallsword, and saber, experimental chemistry ought probably to be at least fifty or sixty skills, and theoretical chemistry a fair number too. But just splitting up chemistry and physics is probably finer resolution than most people want for their campaigns. So I don't worry too much about the kind of question you're talking about.

In practice, there are a lot of tasks where I would allow a roll against either chem or biochem, and possibly also forensics, or poisons, or something else. And I'd mostly improvise my answers rather than try to work them out ahead of time. But I think that's partly because I read enough about the history of the sciences so I'm comfortable making stuff up for them.

[Flyndaran]

Okay, I think I got it now. Thanks everybody.

[acrosome]

I was a BS in biochemistry before going to medical school.

Biochemistry isn't very much about chemistry, per se. You need chemistry to learn it, but then it is it's own highly specialized thing involving enzymes, proteins, hormones, ribosomes, vitamins, etc. Most of what you learn in biochemistry classes isn't at all like chemistry classes- you are assumed to know the basics of that already. What the biochem classes teach you is more practical information (the best word I can think of). Mostly, it is learning a crapton of, well, biochemistry. Huh. So what is biochemistry?

The best example I can give would be to look at this gigantic diagram.

At the end of Biochem 102 being able to draw this from memory is expected of any biochemist. Not literally, but yes you had better know everything on it. It is a huge diagram of all of the most important biosynthetic pathways in a cell- essentially, the Krebs cycle and everything that feeds into it, plus you need to know how DNA and RNA synthesis works (ribosomes, etc.). Bear in mind, as I said, this is Biochem 101 and 102. This is the baseline that you need to learn more biochemistry. This is junior year, after basic chemistry and organic chemistry your freshman and sophomore years. Or, it's also covered in one semester of medical school the first year. I was really glad that I knew it already.

A chemist will know organic chemistry but probably not biochemistry (they're different) unless some project led him to learn a bit. He'd be able to figure out how to make a given organic molecule (i.e. urea or vitamin C or, hell, succinate) in a reactor, but he/she isn't really the guy to figure out how frex that sewer reek produces it's acid. Organic chemistry is the chemistry of organic molecules, but biochemistry is how they are actually synthesized and used in living things. There are a lot of organic molecules that would simply not be practical to synthesize in a purely chemical reactor- it's much easier to use a bioreactor.

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

So Biochemistry is a subset of Biology, but never Chemistry, in Gurps terms?

In GURPS terms I'm not sure, but IRL it truly is a sort of fusion of both. A biochem major in the US has to take both basic biology, chemistry, and organic chemistry first, as well as some biology electives. As mentioned by others above, pH and buffering are a Big Deal in biochemistry.

I hope this has been helpful.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by acrosome

The best example I can give would be to look at this gigantic diagram.

I have that poster on my wall. I am such a nerd... :o)

Originally Posted by acrosome

At the end of Biochem 102 being able to draw this from memory is expected of any biochemist. Not literally, but yes you had better know everything on it. It is a huge diagram of all of the most important biosynthetic pathways in a cell- essentially, the Krebs cycle and everything that feeds into it, plus you need to know how DNA and RNA synthesis works (ribosomes, etc.).

Well, maybe not draw it from memory, but at least be able to navigate around it. Certainly be able to find anything important on it very quickly. It's like... Bill isn't required to be able to reproduce all his style manuals from memory, but he is supposed to find what he's looking for pretty quickly.