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What?
The Enterprise Biology Software Project sees biology as a
collection of elegant puzzles all of which have surprisingly
well-known solutions. For the most part, however, these solutions
are well-known to our biology - but not to us.
Why is this the case? What can we do about it?
Since we already know that biological puzzles are made up of many
little parts, our first step toward finding a solution consists of
assembling a collection of parts and then figuring out how they fit
together. Success is easy to spot. It appears as "pictures" that
take the form of equations.
Equations appear wherever order exists in biology. We now know that
one of the richest sources of order can be found in the connections
between parts. Apparently, something important seems to be gained
by maintaining parts in exact proportions - one to another. In
effect, it offers us an opportunity to explore biology as a
mathematical science.
Did you know that each biological part is defined by an equation,
which, in turn, belongs to a larger family of equations? Also, did
you know that we can take a part out of the biological hierarchy to
study it, but we cannot take the hierarchy out of the part? What
does this mean? It means that unless we put our experimental data
back where they belong in the hierarchy, the data lose their ability
to tell us what we want to know. Why? When used to look for
changes, most isolated data quickly collapse into a semiquantitative
state where they become ambiguous and cannot be trusted. Why? When
disconnected they can no longer play by the rules of nature. How do
we prevent this? Learn to play by the rules.
This
year, the difficulty of the puzzles reaches the level of an
information infrastructure wherein many interacting variables come into
play. Now our strategy shifts. At this level, we can improve our
chances of success importantly by partnering directly with biology.
This requires a willingness to ask and answer questions in ways
acceptable to biology.
Glacier National Park, Montana
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