Mathematical Biology Is Our Secret Weapon In the Fight Against Disease (scientificamerican.com)

An anonymous reader shares excerpts from a Scientific American article: In recent years, increasingly detailed experimental procedures have lead to a huge influx in the biological data available to scientists. This data is being used to generate hypotheses about the complexity of previously abstruse biological systems. In order to test these hypotheses, they must be written down in the form of a model which can be interrogated to determine whether it correctly mimics the biological observations. Mathematics is the natural language in which to do this. In addition, the advent of, and subsequent increase in, computational ability over the last 60 years has enabled us to suggest and then interrogate complex mathematical models of biological systems. The realisation that biological systems can be treated mathematically, coupled with the computational ability to build and investigate detailed biological models, has led to the dramatic increase in the popularity of mathematical biology. Maths has become a vital weapon in the scientific armoury we have to tackle some of the most pressing questions in medical, biological and ecological science in the 21st century. By describing biological systems mathematically and then using the resulting models, we can gain insights that are impossible to access though experiments and verbal reasoning alone. Mathematical biology is incredibly important if we want to change biology from a descriptive into a predictive science -- giving us power, for example, to avert pandemics or to alter the effects of debilitating diseases.

Comments

Re:They are just now figuring this out?

[grasshoppa]

This is why I take "expert" dietary recommendations with a huge grain of salt ( which isn't, as it turns out, the devil it once was. Joining coffee and eggs on the pile of things which "may or may not be good or horrible for you" ).

It's staggering not only how much we don't know about how our bodies really work, but also how confident "we" are in what we only think we know. I'm also amazed at slow new information is propagated out. For instance; we knew in the 80s, the 80s that fat wasn't the dietary enemy that had been made out in previous studies ( well, "studies" given their methodology included throwing out data that didn't agree with their conclusions ), yet it would take another 30+ years before that started becoming general knowledge. In the meanwhile, increased sugar based diets ravaged the population.

We're still just stumbling around blind on this.

Re:A bigger challenge than you may think

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an engineer that works with biologists doing academic biological research. I'm going to have to disagree on some points, or at least ask for clarification.

The example you gave of "dogma" is definitely not held as sacrosanct among biologists. There are a wide number of well understood mechanisms that lead to varying protein structure based on a single DNA sequence. While its often a working assumption the DNA translates to protein through a direct and repeatable route, which is many ways is a good assumption, I would say the vast majority, if not all, of PhD level biologists I interact with understand that that is not an absolute.

And again, I'm actually fairly shocked by the statement "At this point, most biologists either have forgotten, or never appreciated, that these systems are measuring secondary effects and generalizations of true biological function" as that is so contradictory to my experience. Biologists will hammer each other on that very point. At conferences, in grant reviews, in paper reviews, and informally. Someone who makes claims off of a single measurement type will be pushed to make other measurements, at genetic, protein, and functional levels.

As to the statement that "Convincing them that a quantitative, direct, math-and-physics based approach to biology can produce helpful information is an enormous cultural challenge." Again, I disagree. I have no trouble finding collaborators. Everyone wants an engineer (or biophysicist, or mathematician) on their team. Some of the most respected speakers at the last American Society of Cell Biologists meeting I attended were from hard sciences.

And I wouldn't accuse of this, but I will say, there is a huge class of problems in biology that is not, at the moment, amenable to more direct measurements or rigorous physical modeling. And I have seen, many times, a math heavyweight or physics heavyweight weigh in on a problem without understanding the known complexities let alone the "unknown unknowns". And there is regularly pushback from biologists, because that is, quite bluntly, unhelpful.

But give the average biologist a rigorous, validated tool that they can use in their lab (cost, accessibility, etc) to make DIRECT measurements of something? It will get snapped up immediately. I have zero problem convincing collaborators of the usefulness of AFM, or superresolution microscopy, or nanorheology, etc as long as it provides a truly direct measurement of what they are interested in.

I'm certainly not going to make a claim that what you described doesn't exist at all, but I've been in academic research for almost 2 decades now, spanning multiple fields, multiple institutions across the US, have overseas collaborators, etc, and that is just not something I've ever seen. For example, I'm currently helping a collaborator with intracellular pH measurements, and we are using several correlative methods. And we are using several because if we only used one, we would get push back from paper reviewers. They would be THRILLED to have a direct measurement device, provided it was reasonable in cost and actually worked.

Biology is becoming more and more quantitative every year. In my experience, that is embraced and sought out by researchers...it just makes their jobs easier.