Reductionism has served cell biologists well in the past decades, but systems biologists are now promising to broaden the picture. The challenge will be to provide not just the lists and quantitation but real mechanistic insights.
We've all seen the list papers. There are lists of genes in genomes, lists of transcripts in different cell types, and lists of protein interactions in model organisms. If those eye-glazing lists are all that systems biology has to offer, some old fashioned reductionists are happy to stick to their hypothesis-driven, one-gene-at-a-time experiments.
But the department names continue to change. Methods certainly changed in the 1970s and 1980s as departments of biochemistry morphed to departments of molecular biology and cell biology; now the backers of new departments of systems biology are confident that their new approach will bring a shift in how biology is investigated.
One of those proponents...
