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A few general thoughts...

What do biologists want?

- to understand how biological processes work:

Examples:    How does the brain work?    How do we think?    How do we learn?    Why do we get tired?    Why am I sneezing?    How do whales know where to swim to?    How do elephants communicate?    Why do we get old?    Why should I eat organic vegetables?

    ...

What's the biological chemists approach?

A biological chemist believes that by understanding the underlying molecular mechanism of a biological process, we may be able to answer questions such as above.

What belongs to understanding a molecular mechanism?

    what are the molecules involved?

    which part of each molecule is important?

    how do the molecules change during an action?

    what facilitates such changes?

    what are the time scales of actions?

    what are the important properties (e.g. how strong is an interaction?) of any part of the mechanism?

    what gets a molecule to do certain things and to have certain properties?

Why do we ask all these questions?

- because we want to copy nature and design things according to those principles (nano-machines, biosensors etc.)

- because we want to cure diseases and live forever (à la "if we understand how this works, then we also understand when and why it doesn't work and what we can do to make it work again or prevent it from failing")

- we want to change existing processes and make them adopt to a certain environment and/or function better

- because we are megalomaniacs

What is the role of bioinformatics and computational biology in this endeavor?

- there is a book in which all this is written down: the genomes. We know how to read it, and we understand some but not all of it, but it's a very lengthy and tedious book, especially when one doesn't know what it means.

- we have sophisticated tools to test specific aspects. We just cannot afford to spend 20 years per molecule involved in a biological process because there are too many molecules involved. Someone needs to tell us what's the best experiment to do with the highest amount of information.

- many molecules are active simultaneously, a single researcher can't keep track of all of them.

- we can't see the patterns in so much data, because we don't know what is the best way of representing them or what we have to ignore or to add to make the patterns stand out