Science 2002 Systems Biology英文电子书.pdf

S Y S T E M S B I O L O G Y I N T R O D U C T I O N Whole-istic Biology f someone were to analyze current notions and fashionable catchwords, he would find ‘systems’ high on the list. The concept has pervaded all fields of science and penetrated into popular think- “ ing, jargon, and mass media.” In keeping with this fashion, Science presents this week a spe- cial issue with emphasis on systems biology. And we note that this is a trend with remark- able staying power, for the words quoted above were written not for today’s issue of Science, but rather in Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s 1967 introduction to his book, General System Theo- I ry,* a compilation of his writings, some of which date back to 1940! Bertalanffy applied general systems theory not only to biology, but to psychology, economics, and social science as well. In his view, old-fashioned science “tried to explain observable phe- nomena by reducing them to an interplay of elementary units investigatable independently of each other.” Contemporary science, on the other hand, recognized the importance of “wholeness,” de- fined as “problems of organization, phenomena not resolvable into local events, dynamic interac- tions manifest in the difference of behavior of parts when isolated or in higher configuration, etc.; in short, ‘systems’ of various orders not understandable by investigation of their respective parts in isolation.” And this remains an effective definition of systems biology as practiced today with the integration and application of mathematics, engineering, physics, and computer science to under- standing a range of complex biological regulatory systems. The delay between the early pronouncement of the theory and the wor