I imagine many readers of this news group will have read the article called
"Genomics and human life span---what's left to extend?" by Richard C.
Strohman in Nat. Biotechnol. 19, 195 (March 2001). Could any of them
enlighten me as to what the following sentences mean:
'The appeal and [in italics] wider profitability [end italics] of this new
technology would derive from its realizable goals: inclusiveness and proven
effectiveness. In spite of many views to the contrary [8], "complexity"
science behind these overviews is sound---metabolic control analysis being
only one recent example.'
I am baffled by this. In what sense is metabolic control analysis an
example of the soundness of overviews based on complexity theory?
Ref. 8 is the article by David Fell and Andreas Wagner in Nat. Biotechnol.
8, 1121--1122 (November 2000) on "The small world of metabolism". It's well
worth reading, incidentally, but the reference to it here baffles me
further. Maybe the central point of their message escaped me when I read it
(and continues to escape me now), but it wasn't at all clear to me that
they were arguing that complexity science was unsound (or indeed expressing
an opinion about it one way or the other).
What's going on here? Has he put the wrong reference? But in any case,
whatever the reference is supposed to be, does it mean anything?
Of the two "overviews" referred to, one is a bit long to quote, but the
other is that "to be enduring, agriculture must imitate the local processes
of nature". I can't see anything here that metabolic control analysis would
disagree with. Indeed, one of the points that Jannie Hofmeyr and I have
struggled to convince people of for the past decade has been that
biotechnology needs to take account of the mechanisms of metabolic
regulation that exist in natural organisms, and that when genetic engineers
try to overcome them by brute force they fail.
[Tidying this up to send to the news group I have realized that it is not
only ref. 8 that is inappropriate; refs. 4 and 5 are clearly wrong as well.
So presumably the references got renumbered at some stage in an
inconsistent way (the 90% of scientists who seem to prefer numbered
references over author-year references may like to reflect on the
implications of this, but that's a different argument). Nonetheless, it
still seems that there are some points here of sufficient interest to
discuss even once the basic mistake is corrected.]
athel
--
Athel Cornish-Bowden athel at ibsm.cnrs-mrs.frhttp://ir2lcb.cnrs-mrs.fr/~athel/homepage.htm
Phone: + 33 491 16 41 38; fax: + 33 491 16 45 78
CNRS-BIP, B.P. 71, 13402 Marseille Cedex 20, France
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