Last week, I attended the Systems Biology Summit in Richmond, Virginia. The opening session in the Summit was entitled "the Systems Biology Challenge in 21st Century Biomedical Research". It consisted of speakers from the Research Institute, the National Institute of Health, Academia, and the Pharmaceutical industry providing their various viewpoints of Systems Biology.
Dr. Leroy Hood began the session with his keynote lecture on systems approaches in Biology and Medicine. The following is Dr. Hood's thoughts on where we are in systems biology:
The information we are finding represents the "parts" of the system, when we move into the realm of establishing functionality of the system we are determining the blueprints for these parts.
A later speaker, Dr. Keith Elliston of Genstruct, expanded the discussion with his research on biological causal networks and their use for diagnostic reasoning or predictive inference. The following was his entertaining quote on networks and pathways that was repeated throughout the weekend:
System biology is not pathways but networks...stupid. A pathways is a specific path through the network.
Another entertaining quote was from Dr. Burt Adelman, representing Industry's perspective and their thoughts on the transition of animal research to human treatments.
We treat humans. They're very complex not inbred... mostly. We have to find what aspects of human biology are animal research reproducing.
The session ended with a panel discussion on systems biology. The most intriguing of the topics covered was the current problems in systems biology:
- The peer review system for grant applications in the United States.
- Researchers fear of failure.
- Lack of effective collaborations.
- The lack of tools for non-elite scientists.
- The need of better leadership in the scientific community.
Overall I thought the summit was a great experience and I would go again if another opportunity arose. I got to network with different people and learned some new things that I will discuss on this blog in the next couple of weeks. My biggest gripe with the summit was that it was 90% presentations and 10% workshop. As a programmer coming into biology I know I should not expect anything like the WWDC, but if we are to build better collaborations and novel tools I just think the summit could have spent more time with people working together rather than gathering in a room and listening to one person talk. It would be interesting to put something like that together one day, what does everyone think?
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