The life sciences have strong traditions as quantitative disciplines. In several fields quantitatively minded research was at a zenith in the 1960s and 1970s. Flick through, for example, chapters of the American Physiological Society's Handbook of Physiology that were published in this era (and even into the 1980s) and one will see physiology revealed as an engineering science, applying the tools of chemical, mechanical, and electrical engineering to measure, analyze, and simulate biological systems. A great deal of biochemical research in the 1960s and 1970s was focused on the kinetics, thermodynamics, and generally physical chemistry of biochemical systems. From this work emerged an interdisciplinary field sometimes called biophysical chemistry, which encompasses a collection of physical and mathematical methods for analyzing molecular structure and dynamics.

This great era of quantitative physiology and biochemistry was temporarily sidetracked by revolutions in molecular biology and molecular genetics, which, at risk of oversimplification, are focused on the question of what is there (inside a cell) rather than how it works. In the 1980s and 1990s much of the physically oriented quantitative research in biology was similarly focused on isolated molecules. In the 1990s the term molecular biophysics arose as a popular name of new departments combining experimental techniques with theory and simulation, emphasizing physicochemical approaches to studying biological macromolecules.