> Hence there is no commitment to an ideological reductionism to the > business. In other words, the Economist magazine reflects that their > staff sees no metaphysics of reductionism, they see a technique of > business arising in various businesses using systemic methods based > upon biological research as the results of reductionist methods can't > systemize what is known about biology. > thanks,
Doyle, I think you are placing too much expectation on Systems Biology. It is a new field in some ways, it is not so new in the sense that mathematization of biology has been a long-standing dream of theoreticians. This history involves names such as D'arcy Thompson, Alan Turing, George Gamow, Henry Quastler, Nicholas Rashevsky and many others, and has largely been a story of promising too much and failing to deliver. Evelyn Keller (a favorite author of mine) documents a lot of this very nicely in her 2002 book "Making sense of life". The modern practitioners of the recent Systems Biology are well-aware of this and are actively trying to avoid over-hype. Rather than conflict with the existing framework of "wet" biologists, they are also trying to work in cooperation with it. If you look at recent papers in SB, it is not so much mathematical biology as quantitative biology (there is very little symbolic manipulation or mathematical reasoning, but a great deal of computerized number crunching). So yes, SB as it stands today is more or less mere technique firmly sub-ordinated to experimental biology. Reductionism in biology however goes much deeper than that, and indeed is the implicit basis for genomics, proteomics and the entire business of drug-discovery. There is an interesting feature on SB in Nature magazine that provides more perspective. http://www.nature.com/focus/systemsbiologyuserguide/podcast/index.html -raghu.
