So much of molecular biology and computational biology is tool building, so that one can see things that were not visible before. As Feynman said nearly 60 years ago:
>We have friends in other fields – in biology, for instance. We physicists often look at them and say, "You know the reason you fellows are making so little progress?" (Actually I don't know any field where they are making more rapid progress than they are in biology today.) "You should use more mathematics, like we do." They could answer us – but they're polite, so I'll answer for them: "What you should do in order for us to make more rapid progress is to make the electron microscope 100 times better."
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html
Single-cell sequencing, ATAC-seq, HI-C, ChIP-seq, and all the other new technologies or old technologies like the antibody in this paper, these are all attempts at getting towards that 100x better electron microscope.