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Systems Biology and Understanding Cells
(Saturday June 02 2007)
 | The NYAS looks at efforts to better understand our cells - this is key to the most important potential advances in medicine foreseen for the decades ahead, such as extending the healthy human life span. "Thinking of the cell as a factory and biologists as engineers, [a] geneticist might unscrew every pipe inside the factory, one at a time for controlled experiments, of course, and determine the effect that the change has on the factory's operation, or the cell's function. A structural biologist might focus on the shape and size of one particular valve and try to determine how it contributes to the cell-factory's overall functioning. A biochemist would grind up the whole factory and then try to purify and analyze each of its various parts. ... But as scientists and engineers well know, a strictly reductionist view limits one's ability to see the big picture. A zoom-in-zoom-out process is often necessary to make significant progress in the quest for knowledge. This is the perspective of a systems biologist, who seeks to model the mechanistic details of the inner workings of a cell without losing sight of the larger experimental picture. These are the factory's engineers who create blueprints of the building, annotated in excruciating detail with its key industrial processes, and then step back to admire the plans as a whole." |
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