Systems Biology is a term used to describe a paradigm shift currently playing out in biological research. Ultimately Systems Biology can be described as the antithesis or response to the reductionist approach used in biological research since the inauguration of molecular biology in the last century. Molecular biology allowed us to amass a enormous amount of information. In 2000 the entire human genome was successfully sequenced. However,  we are still waiting for the real applications to pan out from all this information. The code is written with familiar letters, but in a language foreign to us. Consequently its medical applications have been relatively limited. Although industry spending on R&D has increased substantially since 2000, the number of medically active substances which have resulted in an approved pharmaceutical product has dropped simultaneously.

Systems biologists aim to understand living things as a function of their various interactions; not simply as a sum of all their individual parts. This more holistic approach to living systems culminates in being able to model them in a predictive fashion. Consequently a large part of this new approach to studying biological systems depends on interactions with computer scientists and other quantitative and theoretical scientists for it to succeed. Getting biologists to work with scientists from the more quantitative and theoretical, non-life science orientated disciplines, is one of the major challenges of this shift. However, the formation of these new relationships and interactions is exactly what the success of Systems Biology relies on. In sum, Biology should become a more quantitative and predictive natural science; and no longer a simple descriptive science of the world around us.

Systems Biology can be seen as an novel approach to learning and interpreting things such as the complex genomic language described above. We need to go beyond writing down a few sentences or even whole books. The aim is to understand the language of life’s semantics, syntax, and grammar. Using a book as a metaphor for the genome of a single organism, a protein is a word, and a metabolic pathway is a sentence. The content and message the book is like all the interactions within and among cells of a single organism.