This new way of looking at the biological sciences has revolutionized biology and medicine, with its de-emphasis on reductionism, in favor of a more integrated approach.
Up until the end of the twentieth century, the sciences, and the scientific method itself, have been extremely reductionist. This has served science well in the past, but as our understanding of biological systems has developed, it has come to a point where it is much less useful to reduce complex organisms to their constituent parts. Instead, it is far more useful to look at the entire organism – an integration rather than a reduction approach.
Reasons to Favor Systems Biology
This new approach, of looking at an entire system or organism, has been termed systems biology. The term describes both a scientific philosophy, and a branch of biological science. It is a complex type of science, but has some particular benefits over reductionism that makes it especially useful.
Perhaps the most important of these is simply that humans and other organisms are themselves extremely complex – and in looking at models of human disease, for example, a reductionist approach can be very limiting.
As an aside to this is the concept of emergent properties, in itself an important reason to favor an integrationist rather than a reductionist approach. Emergent properties are those which are a result of the interaction of components in a system. These properties are not apparent when looking at each component of a system in isolation – they only emerge when the system is examined as a system.
The Systems Biology Approach
Systems biology studies entire organisms – an integrated network of genes, proteins, and reactions between them which are ongoing and ever-changing.
A good example of this is in the study of the immune system. A reductionist approach might study one single type of cell in isolation from the rest of the system. An integrated systems biology approach, on the other hand, would be more likely to view that cell type within the context of the entire immune system – not only cells, but also proteins, the genes that code for those proteins, and the interactions that occur between cells, proteins, genes, and other components of the system.
This type of approach has emerged largely as a result of the initiation and eventual completion of the human genome project, which contributed not only an enormous amount of information, but also reinforced the underlying importance of genes and genetics in understanding biological systems.
References and Further Reading
Systems Biology, the 21st Century Science