Diversity in time complements diversity in space: Chronobiology and chronomics complement Mendel's genetics and Purkinje's self-experimentation

A negative attitude prevailed in the late 1940s and earliest 1950s toward biological rhythms and toward what became chronobiology. Then, still in the 1950s, it turned out that these rhythms, used as "controls" of what happens, themselves can account for the difference between fife and death under the seemingly standardized conditions of a laboratory, whether the stimulus was physical, like noise or whole-body irradiation; or other, such as a bacterial endotoxin or drug. A new science of the interplay of make-ups in time around and in us came about: chronobiology. Nowadays chronomics (mapping time structures) with the major aim of quantifying normalcy, thereby detecting earliest risk elevation, also yields the dividend of allowing molecular biology to focus on the normal as well as on the grossly abnormal.