Systems Biology Is Taking Off

There is a revolution occurring in the biological sciences. It took off just a couple of years ago and is now clearly visible in the literature. Some scientists in the field like to refer to the development as the birth of systems biology, whereas others prefer not to put a label on what is happening.

Modern molecular biology was born with the discovery that genetics is based on nucleic acid chemistry (Watson and Crick 1953), and one way to define it is to say that molecular biology is a large box of tools to do genetics by manipulating DNA. This definition may sound disheartening, but its positive side is that the tools can be applied to all aspects of biology to solve essentially all scientific problems that may arise.

One result of molecular biology is large-scale sequencing of genomes from a rapidly growing number of organisms. Genome sequencing is not possible without the use of computers with large memory and tools to handle the enormous amounts of data that are generated in the massive sequencing efforts. The need for data handling led to another box of tools, called bioinformatics, which is now an established part of molecular biology. However, when all this sequence data got into computers, it became obvious that the genetic blueprints by themselves tell us very little about the functional behavior of cells and multicellular organisms; that is, about what we really want to know about biological systems. In this way, the human genome project, which is perhaps the most spectacular success of molecular biology, also meant that a vast space of future research of a radically different kind became visible. To understand the causal connections between genotype and phenotype will require a very significant expansion of the traditional toolbox used by molecular biologists. It must include …