Bob Phair wrote:
>> 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.
Depends upon your sense of scientific aesthetics. While there are no
mathematical theories such as Maxwell's equations, Schroedinger's
equation,
quantum chromodynamics, there are beautiful, unifying ideas. example -
DNA structure, whose elucidation by Watson and Crick, unifies genetic
coding, replication in a similar fashion as many great physics theories
physics.
I consider Hodgkin and Huxley's ideas/experiments brilliant as well.
While the
math is relatively simple, many of their ideas remain valid today and
lay the foundation for describing membrane currents.
My point is that mathematics is not an absoluate necessity for a theory
to be
unifying and beautiful.
> 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
