Systems biology: impressions from a newcomer graduate student in 2016

Abstract

As a newcomer, the philosophical basis of systems biology seems intuitive and appealing, the underlying philosophy being that the whole of a living system cannot be completely understood by the study of its individual parts. Yet answers to the questions “What is systems biology?” and “What constitutes a systems biology approach in 2016?” are somewhat more elusive. This seems to be due largely to the diversity of disciplines involved and the varying emphasis placed on the computational modeling and experimental aspects of systems biology. As such, the education of systems biology would benefit from multidisciplinary collaboration with both instructors and students from a range of disciplines within the same course. This essay is the personal reflection of a graduate student trying to get an introductory overview of the field of systems biology and some thoughts about effective education of systems biology.