The life sciences comprise the fields of science that involve the scientific study of living organisms, such as plants, animals, and human beings, as well as related considerations like bioethics. While biology remains the centerpiece of the life sciences, technological advances in molecular biology and biotechnology have led to a burgeoning of specializations and new, often interdisciplinary, fields.
The following is an incomplete list of life science fields, as well as topics of study in the life sciences, in which several entries coincide with, are included in, or overlap with other entries:
- Affective neuroscience
- Anatomy
- Biomedical science
- Biochemistry
- Biocomputers
- Biocontrol
- Biodynamics
- Bioinformatics
- Biology
- Biomaterials
- Biomechanics
- Biomonitoring
- Biophysics
- Biopolymers
- Biotechnology
- Botany
- Cell biology
- Cognitive neuroscience
- Computational neuroscience
- Conservation biology
- Developmental biology
- Ecology
- Ethology
- Environmental science
- Evolutionary biology
- Evolutionary genetics
- Food science
- Genetics
- Genomics
- Health sciences
- Immunogenetics
- Immunology
- Immunotherapy
- Marine biology
- Medical devices
- Medical imaging
- Microbiology
- Molecular biology
- Neuroethology
- Neuroscience
- Oncology
- Optometry
- Parasitology
- Pathology
- Pharmacogenomics
- Pharmacology
- Physiology
- Population dynamics
- Proteomics
- Sports science
- Structural biology
- Systems biology
- Zoology
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or sciences:
“Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature’s monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.”
—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918)
“These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. We do not know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and taught.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)