A feel for systems

Abstract

Mol Syst Biol. 8: 609 Over the period of just one decade, systems biology has emerged from obscurity and moved center stage. The novelty and rapidly growing notoriety have, unsurprisingly, piqued the interest of students in biology, and also in engineering, physics, computing, and a number of other fields. This growing interest has led to a demand for courses and even complete educational programs in systems biology. The creation of such courses is challenging due to the students’ different backgrounds and also because systems biology has roots in an unusually wide variety of parent disciplines, which no student can fully master. Faced with these complications, one appears to be forced to teach a selection of representative topics and techniques. We believe that this default solution is not always optimal and that it is much more important instead to instill in students a ‘feel’ for biological systems and for models that can be used to explore them. ‘Instilling a feel’ may not sound scientifically rigorous, but the ability to gauge the complexity of a system, without executing a formal analysis, is arguably more beneficial to next‐generation molecular biologists than mastery of selected techniques of systems analysis. Likewise, it will become increasingly more critical for biologists to assess how a computational model could be set up, how it might add genuine value, and where its limitations are. Like others, we had previously taught the typical stepwise design, diagnosis, analysis, and utilization of models in the classroom. We discussed with the students that one must decide early whether to use deterministic or stochastic, continuous or discrete, static or dynamic models, partial …