Top‐down versus bottom‐up—rediscovering physiology via systems biology?

Mol Syst Biol. 3: 113Systems biology is the latest fashion in biology, driven by advances in technology that have provided us with a suite of ‘omics’ techniques providing information or at least data, which is not quite the same thing, but can easily be confused with it at a whole range of levels of biomolecular organisation from genes through proteins to metabolites. The hope is that all of these, when combined in some way, will provide new insights into important biological processes, such as development, ageing, disease and so on, to the benefit of, among other things, the development of new medicines and treatment regimes. While it is easy to be cynical and deride all the hype surrounding this new ‘revolution’ in biology as simply a way of extracting grants from gullible funding agencies and merely yet another panacea for reversing the perceived decline in innovation in pharmaceutical research, there is no doubt that some of the results coming out of some of this work are scientifically very beautiful. For me this is particularly the case where the results provide new insight into something which we have known about for a long time, but which we have forgotten in the …