Calculating life?

Abstract

Systems biology is an excellent research topic for social scientists because systems biologists themselves are fascinated by the social organization of their field. Moreover, as systems biology is an emerging research area, studying it from a sociological perspective allows social scientists to observe how scientists develop new fields of inquiry and practice, and challenge existing institutional and disciplinary structures. This article presents the results of our study of systems biology and of how systems biologists perceive their own field.We start by exploring the organization of knowledge production in systems biology, which is a research 'approach' that brings together biologists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists in novel interdisciplinary arrangements. We then look at how systems biology positions itself in relation to other types of biological inquiry, particularly molecular biology.Discussions of the distinctiveness of systems biology often address the goals of the field: some systems biologists aim to make biology as quantitative, rigorous and predictive as physics and engineering, with the overall objective of making living systems calculable and ultimately predictable; others argue that this aspiration is misplaced, and stress the contingency and unruliness of biology. We explore these tensions, and reflect on their sociological dimensions and their consequences for future interdisciplinary work in the life sciences.This article presents results from our empirical research. We draw on more than 50 interviews with systems biologists from the USA, UK and Japan, as well as attendance at systems biology conferences and workshops, extended visits to laboratories and discussion groups with systems biologists. Although we refer to our respondents by their discipline of training, they all selfidentify as doing systems biology. S ystems biology is usually described as an attempt to make sense of the vast amounts of data that have been generated by genome-sequencing projects and other molecular data-generating exercises. System biologists develop and use algorithms, software and mathematical models to analyse the data in order to produce dynamic in silico models of biological systems. Systems biologists either are, or have recruited to their enterprise, physicists, computer scientists, engineers and mathematicians.As with many new research fields, there is as yet no consensus definition of systems biology. Systems biologists argue, however, that the novelty of their field arises from the kinds of computational technologies that are being used to study biological systems, which have made it possible to accumulate and analyse previously unprecedented levels of molecular data, and have allowed the integration of many different types of data. Our interviewees often said that systems biology is an 'approach', rather than a traditional research discipline. In fact, one of its key features is interdisciplinarity, which interviewees described as necessary to solve the problems that are be...