Here’s a rather interesting and thought-provoking paper: Can a Biologist Fix a Radio? (PDF – 469 KB), by Yuri Lazebnik. The paper is not exactly new, but it’s news to me. It’s all about how experimental biologists would try to find out how a radio works. The article suggests that an engineering-like approach would lead to a deeper understanding of how cells work.
An excerpt:
Conceptually, a radio functions similarly to a signal transduction pathway in that both convert a signal from one form into another (a radio converts electromagnetic waves into sound waves). My radio has about a hundred various components, such as resistors, capacitors, and transistors, which is comparable to the number of molecules in a reasonably complex signal transduction pathway. I started to contemplate how biologists would determine why my radio does not work and how they would attempt to repair it. Because a majority of biologists pay little attention to physics, I had to assume that all we would know about the radio is that it is a box that is supposed to play music.
How would we begin? First, we would secure funds to obtain a large supply of identical functioning radios in order to dissect and compare them to the one that is broken. We would eventually find how to open the radios and will find objects of various shape, color, and size. We would describe and classify them into families according to their appearance. We would describe a family of square metal objects, a family of round brightly colored objects with two legs, round-shaped objects with three legs and so on. Because the objects would vary in color, we will investigate whether changing the colors affects the radios performance. Although changing the colors would have only attenuating effects (the music is still playing but a trained ear of some people can discern some distortion), this approach will produce many publications and result in a lively debate.
(via Freelancing Science and God Plays Dice)
Tags: Biology, Engineering, Scientific Papers, Systems Biology, Yuri Lazebnik
April 11, 2008 at 4:40 am |
Thanks for pointing out this wonderful article.
Although I largely agree with the author that a more formal, quantitative, and mathematical approach is needed in biology, I do think that there is a substantial difference between biological systems and radios that the author has not addressed.
Radios are designed by human beings who have been trained as engineers and are thus familiar with engineering culture and similar previous designs. Furthermore, engineers design complicated systems in a hierarchical fashion, reusing subsystems that have been previously designed. Information about previous designs is passed down to engineers in their academic coursework and by older more experienced engineers in the workplace.
In contrast, biological systems are (ignoring the possibility of intelligent design) the result of a complicated evolutionary process. Unfortunately, we don’t have a recorded history of the evolution of biological systems, and biologists don’t have an opportunity to learn about common features of biological systems from the designers of older biological systems.
This makes the problem of systems biology much harder than the problem of fixing broken radios or in fact any other problem in engineering.
April 11, 2008 at 6:37 pm |
And, to this, let me add a rather philosophical observation! 8)
As the existentialists say, in the case of a radio (or any man-made object, as pointed out by Brian) essence precedes existence, i.e. before the radio was built or came into existence, its purpose was already determined (by humans.) In the case of biological organisms (including humans), existence precedes essence! And, hence the radios and biological systems cannot be compared!
April 14, 2008 at 5:43 am |
@ Vishal
Very good philosophical observation! Thanks for the insight.
I agree with you that in the case of a radio “essence” precedes “existence” since their purpose was determined before they were built. However, I think we can compare biological systems to engineering systems designed by man if we are careful to respect the fundamental differences between both.
From a reverse-engineering viewpoint, philosophical considerations are not very relevant. If you give me the latest Intel microprocessor and ask me to reverse-engineer it, I will likely adopt an experimental biologist’s approach because:
a) I don’t have access to the microprocessor’s wiring diagram.
b) I don’t know the microprocessor’s subsystems in an exact manner. I may know that there may be a region of the microprocessor which is devoted to general-purpose computation, while another area of the microprocessor might be devoted to arithmetic computation. However, I am not sure of anything.
c) I don’t know how microprocessors have evolved in recent years. I once studied the Intel 8051, but that was long ago, and today’s microprocessors might have little to do with the 8051! ;-)
It’s hard to think of engineering systems in abstract terms.
April 14, 2008 at 4:59 am |
@ Brian Borchers
Excellent analysis! I totally agree with everything you wrote.
Once, while discussing the difficulties of Biology with a friend of mine who is an experimental biologist, he told me:
Only seeing what worked is indeed a problem, as we can learn a lot from studying what did NOT work! Assuming the impossibility of intelligent design seems very reasonable and plausible to me ;-)
Let us imagine that an alien spaceship crashes somewhere on Earth. We, humans, will study the wrecked spaceship and try to understand alien technology. It seems reasonable to assume that an alien civilization would develop its technology similarly to the way the humans do it: in a modular and hierarchical fashion. However, we would not have the blueprints, nor the historical knowledge of how the aliens developed their technology.
Note, though, that the laws of physics are the same for us and for aliens. As such, we can try to reverse-engineer alien technology based on our knowledge of physics.
Despite all that, I think it’s likely that we would adopt an experimental biologist’s approach mixed with an engineer’s approach. It’s hard to reverse-engineer systems when one has no idea how they evolved over time in terms of complexity.