I am very rarely accused of being a "doom and gloom" type. Personally, I
would not trade this career for any other. I simply see no reason why
theory is less important to biology than physics.
The difficulties of biology (complexity, inaccuracy, etc) are agruments
*for*, not against, mathematics.
Where are the theoretical biology results that rival Universal
gravitation, or Maxwell's EM field theory, or the prediction that light
is bent in the gravitational field of the sun, or the uncertainty
principle.
Most people to whom I pose this question can think of only one: the
Hodgkin-Huxley action potential model. A model that's little more than a
transfer function.
My own vote would go to irreversible thermodynamics. Here there are
astounding predictions that have been verified by experiment, and
fundamental problems (like why cells don't swell) for which mechanistic
physically satisfying answers have been found. This discipline was going
great when Katchalsky was murdered, Curran died of a premature MI,
Prigogine became obsessed with Chaos, and Kedem went off to convert sea
water to drinking water in the Israeli desert. (please pardon the poetic
license).
To be a great modeler of biological systems, you must be passionate
about details and fascinated by the big picture. My experience (I built
my first model of a biological system in 1967) is that most modelers
pass the first test, but are too busy with math and computing to learn
enough biology to seriously impact the big picture.
I suggest we set a series of grand challenges for modelers. Then begin
to work on them.
{Nothing like an emotional topic to spark activity in a newsgroup.....}
Regards,
Bob
--
Robert D. Phair, Ph.D. rphair at ix.netcom.com
BioInformatics Services http://www.webcom.com/rphair
Partnering and Outsourcing for Computational Biology
