Why Is Milk White?: & 200 Other Curious Chemistry Questions (2013)
1. People and Animals
What does physiology have to do with chemistry?
While biology is the study of living things, physiology is the study of how living things work. Although many aspects of physiology have little to do with chemistry, it is hard to study how living things work without getting into chemistry somewhere.
You might be studying how light is focused in the eye, but eventually you get down to chemistry when you ask how the light gets turned into electrical signals to be sent to the brain. You might be studying how bacteria and viruses cause disease, but without a knowledge of chemistry you won’t get very far.
Almost all of the Nobel Prizes in physiology and medicine were awarded for discoveries or inventions that deal with physiology at the molecular level in some respect.
Before studying physiology in medical school, it is strongly recommended that students first take chemistry courses, because so much of physiology depends on understanding how living things function at the molecular level.