Physicist Amok

I finally got around to watching Rob Phillips’s talk "Physical Biology of the Cell" at KITP.

He’s got some great meat, but my favorite part is at the end where he makes some philosophical comments:

• About an NSF meeting to consider how to handle funding of condensed matter folks going into biology: "There was a representative of the NIH there and his view…was that basically the David Nelsons of the world should go hang out in labs of biology groups and write code."
• "I find it very frustrating that theory has come to mean computation and simulation."
• "There is more to modeling the cell than mining data." He also has some harsh things to say about accumulating terabytes of data.

The first quote accurately represents how many biologists think of the role of physicists in biology. This reflects a persistent animism which tries to draw a line saying that biological systems are fundamentally more complicated (and thus somehow not amenable to physical analysis) than the rest of the physical world. I think it actually reflects a deep seated fear on the part of this same subset of biologists that everyone will realize they’re wasting their time.

And then we have computational biology and its close cousin systems biology. Molecular biology has largely degenerated into listing everything in sight in hopes that understanding will somehow emerge. Systems biology attempts to do this automatically! No longer will people have to pore over long lists of arbitrary three and four letter acronyms people have assigned to certain sequences of nucleic acids. Now a computer can do it for us, and since it can look at so many more, understanding is bound to emerge.

Let’s face it: the only scientific program that has ever produced anything is reductionism. Idealize the system you’re looking at, pare away everything you don’t need to explain the features at hand, and then start building back up. Reduce everything to some set of comprehensible physical phenomenon.