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Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology 7, 829–832 (1 November 2006) | doi:10.1038/nrm2023

Back to the future: education for systems-level biologists

Ned Wingreen & David Botstein

We describe a graduate course in quantitative biology that is based on original path-breaking papers in diverse areas of biology; each of these papers depends on quantitative reasoning and theory as well as experiment. Close reading and discussion of these papers allows students with backgrounds in physics, computational sciences or biology to learn essential ideas and to communicate in the languages of disciplines other than their own.