Chapter 8 The future of cell research
The whole cell is considerably more than the sum of the working parts. The same can also be said about the genome, where the identifi cation of the blueprint for individual molecular components of the cell is undertaken in the expectation that a rigorous characterization of all of the parts separately will lead to an understanding of the whole. This is a system of investigation called reductionism, which has been a dominant philosophy in biological investigation for decades. However, just to identify the molecular parts of the puzzle is not going to tell us how the whole works if we do not understand the rules for their assembly. This requires the development of approaches to investigate ‘systems biology’ or ‘biocomplexity’, and represents a paradigm shift (i.e. ‘thinking outside the box’) in biological research, wherein the challenge is to understand the collective interactions of multiple molecular processes, not only within the cell itself, but also at the tissue, organ, and organism level. The bottom line is ‘do the molecules drive the cell to drive the organism, or does the organism drive the cell and its molecules? In reality, such interactions lie somewhere between the cell responding to its immediate environment, balanced against the controls of gene expression.