Know the Differences Between Biology, Biochemistry, Biotechnology, and Biomedical Technology

The above topic seems confusing to some people as regards making important career choices, job applications and specializations.

Biology is any field of science that is focused on trying to understand how living things work. It encompasses every other discipline you listed in the question details.

Biochemistry is a more specialized science, dedicated to determining the chemistry underlying living things.

Biotechnology is super closely related to biochemistry. Biotechnology utilizes biochemistry in order to build something useful. This can include drugs, but also is involved with exploiting organisms to make useful chemicals. Strictly speaking, brewing is an application of biotechnology.

Biomedical science is any field of science that looks at biology which can be useful for medical applications. This includes drugs, diagnostics, risk markers, prognostic markers, and even the fundamentals of how diseases and disorders work.

I can understand the confusion behind this question as these are all closely related fields. There’s a ton of overlap between them during education and in application. Think of it like this, a biochemist may utilize biotechnology to perform biomedical research.

In Summary of these facts:

1. Biology: science that studies life in general. This means all living forms and non living like viruses, studies behavior, activities, changes and everything related to microorganisms and macroorganisms and everything related to interaction between them and their environment.
2. Biochemistry: science that studies the chemistry of life forms and viruses. This includes the biomolecules, metabolic pathways, interaction between molecules, “behavior” of those molecules and building of more complex molecules that creates structures.
3. Biotechnology: science that studies the application of technology for manipulating living organisms, biomolecules like DNA or RNA, viruses, insertion of genes into other organisms like the Insulin gene to bacteria, unfortunately the creation of biological weapons of mass destruction, the manufacture of pro-biotics and pre-biotics, etc.
4. Biomedics: science that studies everything related to medicine. As you will see in the name, it studies the chemistry, biology and physics of all the sciences related to medicine like immunology, physiology, genetics, etc. Many goals are to synthesize less toxic drugs, improve the diagnosis of sicknesses, etc.

I hope you understood everything and as you can see all of them are related and intertwined.