In article <3372E7D1.1145 at ibsm.cnrs-mrs.fr>, athel at ir2cbm.cnrs-mrs.fr wrote:
> David and Jean-Pierre are right: the article by Richard C Strohman in
> Nature Biotechnology 15, 194-200 (1997) is well worth a read. A lot more
> worth a read than I thought when I first saw it, when I didn't get past
> the first few paragraphs as I was put off by all the philosophical
> verbiage that camouflages some important points that molecular
> biologists ought to consider seriously. Even without the philosophy,
> however, I doubt whether many of them would read it (any more than they
> pay a lot of attention to this news group); with the philosophy I would
> say there is no hope.
We are not all beyond hope, you know.
Seriously, Prof.Mark Fergusson (Manchester) recently organised a
DTI-sponsored one-day workshop on 'Integrative biology'. Although little
of it was about metabolic regulation per se, there was agreement from
die-hard geneticists to drug discovery managers to pharmacologists that a
more organismal, systems approach to biology was needed, and that genes
alone do not make up people. I am sure that Strohman's polemic marks a
slight but significant shift towards quantitative, mathematical,
system-orientated biology. After all, can you imagine it being published 5
yeasr ago at the height of 'genome fever'?
William Bains
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William Bains
