Fwd: Living energies mini series - No System in Systems Biology

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22 Jan 2004 11:51:49 -0000

Living energies mini series - No System in Systems Biology

press-release

 

The Institute of Science in Society

Science Society Sustainability

http://www.i-sis.org.uk

 

General Enquiries sam

Website/Mailing List press-release

ISIS Director m.w.ho

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Living energies mini-series

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The secret of life is not to be found in the molecular nuts and bolts in living

organisms. Instead, it may be in how organisms use energy. This mini-series will

hint at what lies in store, which gives concrete meanings to renewable living

energy and sustainability.

 

No System in Systems Biology

Biology’s Theory of Everything

Energy, Productivity & Biodiversity

Why Are Organisms So Complex – A Lesson in Sustainability

 

 

Biology has lost its way in more ways than one.

 

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reports on the desperation to make sense of the data deluge

pouring out from genomics and related research.

 

Compared to ‘hard’ sciences like physics and chemistry, biology has been

remarkably lacking in theoretical foundations. Much of biology remains at the

descriptive level, as the term ‘botanising’ so aptly implies.

 

 

Molecular genetics, which has dominated biology for decades, is worse in many

respects. A lengthy compendium of ‘cook-book’ recipes and an armoury of routine

techniques make all but the most banal theorizing redundant if not irrelevant.

If anything, ‘theorizing’ is frowned upon as ‘mere speculation’, and not to be

trusted as much as ‘more experiments’.

 

 

As genome sequences are still spilling out of sequencing machines, ‘gene

discovery’ has passed into the humdrum, and researchers are desperate to recover

raison d’etre in ‘transcriptomics’ and ‘proteomics’ to follow genomics. They are

lifting the lid on even more bewildering complexities and generating a data

deluge that threatens to drown out the biggest computers plus the armies of

information technologists needed to service them. The amount of data in the

public database at the National Center for Biotechnology Information doubles

every 12 months. There are 1 200 person-years of experimental data simply on the

role of a few genes in the development of the fruitfly. The academic

institutions are rising to the challenge.

 

 

In September 2003, Harvard University Medical School opened a new department in

20 years to focus on ‘systems biology’. Nearby, Massachusetts Institute of

Technology had already started a Computational and Systems Biology Initiative

with 80 faculty members. The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel,

too, is planning its own systems biology institute. The mission is to forge

links between biologists, mathematicians and engineers to “integrate” the data

deluge into a more complete picture of biological networks from genes to cells

to whole organisms.

 

 

In early November 2003, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National

Institutes of Health (NIH) held workshops on systems biology. This injection of

funding has done much to lift the spirits and the hopes of molecular

geneticists.

 

 

Sydney Brenner, 2002 Nobel laureate for genome sequencing, warns people not to

get “infatuated with data for its own sake”. He says that, “if we do not define

the problem, we won’t know what information is important.” He declares as

“rubbish” the idea that one can “make a lot of measurements and something will

come out of it.”

 

 

Life has stubbornly refused to yield up its secret so far. No meaning of life

can be deciphered from the molecular nuts and bolts, however complicated. No

unifying concept has emerged, or will ever emerge, for understanding the whole

organism, let alone the living world, simply by amassing more data on yet more

molecules, or connecting them up in dense jungles of interaction networks that

give anyone but the most dedicated a splitting headache.

 

 

How fortunate that there are biologists who still set their sights on organisms

and ecosystems. They may well be on the way to discovering biology’s ‘theory of

everything’, a theory that promises to unify the living world, giving us

tantalizing glimpses of organisms behaving as indivisible wholes.

 

 

Source

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Pennisi E. Tracing life’s circuitry. Science 2003, 302, 1646-9.

 

 

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General Enquiries sam

Website/Mailing List press-release

ISIS Director m.w.ho

 

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