Like it or not, big biology is here to stay.
From anatomy to physiology to molecular biology, biological research has for decades been on an ascending slope of increasing systems complexity. The availability of genome sequences heralds a sharp acceleration in the upturn of that slope. Today biology is dominated by small, investigator-driven groups of 'wet' biologists. But techniques looking at the integrated functioning of hundreds to thousands of genes and proteins — such as microarray and other 'whole genome' analyses — inevitably raise the question of whether the study of one or a few genes or proteins is sophisticated enough, given the need to understand cells, pathways and whole organisms.
Wet biology will continue to be essential, but deep understanding of biological processes will also require a more quantitative molecular biology, with a firm grounding in the behaviour of complex networks. A shift towards an information-oriented systems view of biology, which grasps both mathematically and biologically the many elements of a system, and the relationships among them that allow the construction of an organism, is under way.
But the social change required to make this shift painlessly should not be underestimated. Research groups and institutions will need to take bold steps to embrace computational biology and high-throughput technologies, and to move the emphasis from investigator-driven grant proposals to supporting large multidisciplinary teams that extend beyond departmental and institutional boundaries.
These issues have been considered by some, for example by the National Institutes of Health's new Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (http://grants.nih.gov/grants/bistic/bistic.cfm). The Bio-X Program at Stanford University is also one of several new flagship interdisciplinary programmes tackling this 'bigger picture of biology'. But one cannot help feeling that the message has yet to reach the bulk of the troops and, moreover, that few of the generals are providing the leadership for them to attack these new fronts confidently. “What does the human genome sequence mean for me, my research and my institution?” is a question all biologists should be asking themselves.
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Post-genomic cultures. Nature 409, 545 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1038/35054677
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35054677
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