23 - Can a systems biologist fix a Tamagotchi?

Summary

Abstract

Gilles Kahn was a serious scientist, but part of his style and effectiveness was in the great sense of curiosity and fun that he injected in the most technical topics. Some of his later projects involved connecting computing and the traditional sciences. I offer a perspective on the culture shock between biology and computing, in the style in which I would have explained it to him.

The nature of nature

In a now classic peer-reviewed commentary, “Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?”, Yuri Lazebnik describes the serious difficulties that scientists have in understanding biological systems. As an analogy, he describes the approach biologists would take if they had to study radios, instead of biological organisms, without having prior knowledge of electronics.

We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size […]. We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we will investigate whether changing the colors affects the radio's performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some people can discern some distortion), this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.