Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
programs in systems biology and have looked at these from the perspective
that they are new ways of doing science (e.g. Westerhoff & Kell, this volume).
Because of their ability to capture the whole, genome-wide experimentation
should enable a data-driven hypothesis generation that might bring one to a much
more complete, perhaps phenomenological, understanding than in other, more
unbounded sciences such as physics. Reconstruction
in silico
of living cells or
pathway functions thereof, on the basis of quantitative molecular biochemistry
and biophysics focusing on interactive properties, should be able to establish
a complete description for the other side. The integrative systems biology in
which the two approaches meet should merge phenomenological and mechanis-
tic descriptions and enable a validated complete description from molecules to
system and vice versa (Krohs & Callebaut, this volume). Some of the discoveries
made by the new systems biology have been referenced in this topic and there-
fore, it may now be possible to judge whether these new ways of doing science
may lead somewhere and whether the science produced has any scientific value.
If so, then this may contribute to a relaxation of the antipathies against the new
systems biology, as well define what is systems biology and should be promoted
to become even more so, and what is just a linear composition of classical scien-
tific activities. It should put an end to the tendency of some mathematicians and
physicists to play down the discipline as it is not sufficiently scientific from the
point of view of mathematics and physics. And just as well, it should help reduce
the symmetrical effect of molecular and cell biologists suggesting that the mod-
eling and theory efforts in systems biology are inappropriate for their disciplines.
If they wish, all these suggestions are right, but this topic showed that systems
biology is a discipline in its own right, which has its own criteria for scientific
endeavor, which differ from and may well be more than the sum of the criteria of
the above-mentioned disciplines. This outcome of this topic may therewith help
the scientists who need to evaluate grant proposals. Perhaps surprisingly, this is
quite a practical application of this topic on the methodological and philosophical
foundations of systems biology, and again this is a unique function of this topic.
The ability to describe completely and explain all system behaviors mechanis-
tically reminds us of a few physical chemical systems for which this is also the
case, but none of the latter have a complexity that is anywhere near the minimum
complexity of living organisms. In both types of systems, the question arises
whether such an ability to describe a system completely and mechanistically
implies that it is understood completely. Human understanding tends to have
an element of simplification, of moving from the detail-laden specific to the
general and indeed, as discussed in this topic (e.g. Schaffner; Westerhoff & Kell;
Wolkenhauer, this volume), another aspect of systems biology is the discovery
of general principles of biological systems. Indeed, systems biology is not just
specific. It is not about a single organism. It theorizes about organisms in gen-
eral. The power of its approaches is evident from the successes of bioinformatics
