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Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 18e
| Part 3. Genes, the Environment, and Disease > |
Chapter e19. Systems Biology in Health and Disease
Sections: Systems Biology in Health and Disease: Introduction, Further Readings.
Topics Discussed: systems biology.
Excerpt:"The field of human biology has progressed over the last three centuries, largely as a result of the reductionist approach to the scientific problems that challenge the discipline. Biologists study the experimental response of a variable of interest in a cell or organism while holding all other variables constant. In this way, it is possible to dissect the individual components of a biologic system and assume that a thorough understanding of a specific component (e.g., an enzyme or a transcription factor) will provide sufficient insight to explain the global behavior of that system (e.g., a metabolic pathway or a gene network, respectively). Biologic systems are, however, much more complex and manifest behaviors that frequently (if not invariably) cannot be predicted from knowledge of their component parts characterized in isolation. Growing recognition of this shortcoming of conventional biologic research has led to the development of a new discipline, systems biology, that is defined as the holistic study of living organisms or their cellular or molecular network components to predict precisely their response to perturbations. Concepts of systems biology can be applied readily to human disease and therapy and define the field of systems pathobiology, in which genetic or..."
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