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.