OK I’ve been away a very long time. Maybe that means I have a life…. But I needed a place to say this:
Douglas Kell (Chief Executive of the UK’s BBSRC) is interviewed in a recent issue of Nature (volume 458, page 1063). He bangs the drum for systems biology, and says: “the reductionist strategy certainly hasn’t helped us to understand complex systems”. …certainly hasn’t helped us to understand… How absurd is that?
For those of us still interested in molecular biology a lovely irony follows. Asked to identify the scientific achievement that gave him greatest satisfaction, Kell nominates the discovery of resuscitation promoting factor (Rpf) in Micrococcus luteus and related Gram-positive Bacteria. Now I thought that the Rpf work was cool (see for example, The rpf gene of Micrococcus luteus encodes an essential secreted growth factor) but it is surely an illustration of how an elegant reductionst approach can help us to understand a complex system.
There, rant over. You could say that I’ve been resuscitated from my dormancy, ha ha. Expect to hear from me again in another year or so. Or maybe sooner.
