17 years of systems biology

I know that 17 years is not a very round number. It is also fairly arbitrary as I am assuming systems biology started around 2000 (see below). I was last week in Portugal, where every year for the past 8 years I have been teaching a week long course on Systems and Synthetic Biology to theGABBA PhD program. This might be the last year I take part in this course and so I felt it would be a good time to try to put some thoughts in a blog post. This course has been jointly co-organised from the beginning withSilvia Santosand we had several guests throughout the years including Mol Sys Bioeditors Thomas Lemberger and Maria Polychronidou and other PIs: Julio Saez-Rodriguez,Andre Brown,Hyun Youk andPaulo Aguiar. Some of what I write below has been certainly influenced by discussions with them. This is not meant as an extensive review so apologies in advance for missing references.Where did systems biology come from?It is not contentious to say that systems biology came about in response to the ever narrower view of reductionist approaches in biology. Reductionism is still extremely important and I assume that, as a movement, it was an opposition to the idea that biology was animated by some magical force that could never be comprehended. Since the beginning of the course we have asked students to read the assay “Can a biologist fix a radio?” by Yuri Lazebnik (2002). The article captures well the limitations of reductionist research. The more we know about a system, apo...
Source: Evolution of Cellular Networks - Category: Cytology Source Type: blogs