Branches of science much as it involves a clearly biological aspect. While biology remains the centerpiece of life science, technological advances in molecular biology and biotechnology have led to a burgeoning of specializations and new, often interdisciplinary, fields. "Biology" is the branch of natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines. Zoology, occasionally spelled zoölogy, is the branch of science that relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both
Science and technology in the Soviet Union ministries. The core of fundamental science was the USSR Academy of Sciences, originally set up in 1925 and moved from Leningrad to Moscow in 1934. It consisted of 250 research institutes and 60,500 full-time researchers in 1987, a large percentage in the natural sciences such as biology. All of the union's republics except the RSFSR had their own republican academies of science, while the Urals, Siberian, and Far Eastern regional branches of the academy coordinated fundamental science in Eastern Russia. Medical research was coordinated by the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (), which after 1992 was reorganized into the Russian