Back down to Earth

About a decade ago, systems biology hit the life sciences with the promise that it would revolutionize biological research and create new products, drugs and therapies along the way. As with so many over-hyped ‘breakthroughs’, it inevitably failed to deliver, prompting criticism from a number of eminent biologists. Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner, for example, accused systems biologists of using data as a “substitute for thinking” (http:// www.iisc.ernet.in/centenary-conf/program. html). Advocates for the field have strongly refuted such criticism as a misunderstanding of what systems biology is about, but they have been hard pressed to come up with tangible examples of breakthrough discoveries that would not have been possible following the traditional approach of molecular biology. Even now, direct applications of systems biology in biomedicine remain few, but researchers in the field are increasingly confident that new and useful developments will be forthcoming.