Question

1. What is the reductionism and systems biology and how these 2 approaches can be combined to create effective personalized medicine in the future?

Answer 1

The technique used in medicine to diagonse is to “divide and conquer,” and it is rooted in the assumption that complex problems are solvable by dividing them into smaller, simpler, and thus more tractable units. Because the processes are “reduced” into more basic units, this approach has been termed “reductionism” and has been the predominant paradigm of science over the past two centuries. Reductionism pervades the medical sciences and affects the way we diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases. While it has been responsible for tremendous successes in modern medicine, there are limits to reductionism, and an alternative explanation must be sought to complement it.

Systems biology, is the systems perspective. Rather than dividing a complex problem into its component parts, the systems perspective appreciates the holistic and composite characteristics of a problem and evaluates the problem with the use of computational and mathematical tools. The systems perspective is rooted in the assumption that the forest cannot be explained by studying the trees individually.

The science underlying our medical practices, from diagnosis to treatment to prevention, is based on the assumption that information about individual parts is sufficient to explain the whole. But there are circumstances in which the complex interplay between parts yields a behavior that cannot be predicted by the investigation of the parts alone. The failure to account for these circumstances is the common denominator for the explanations of why the aforementioned practices are, in many cases, inadequate.

The need to make sense of complex genetic interactions has led some researchers to shift from a component level to system-level perspective.  The developing fields of chaos theory, nonlinear dynamics, and complex systems science, along with computational science, mathematics, and physics, have also contributed to the analytical armamentarium used by systems analysts.