Lessons on leaving academia
Just over a year ago, I left academia. I had been in that realm for 25 years, working in musculoskeletal biomechanics and human movement analysis. It was a move that might have surprised anyone who...
Jan, 02, 2012
Many systems models are strikingly vulnerable to even small changes in the variables
Systems biologists seek to model many complex biological interactions all at once. Typically, they input tens or even hundreds of variables to produce predic- tions about a system—for example,...
Jan, 01, 2008
How cell-centered models are adding fundamental insights into our understanding of cell behaviors
The cell is like our financial system: Even if you have a diagram of all the complex interactions going on, you still cannot intuit how the whole system will react when perturbed. Indeed, the cell...
Apr, 01, 2010
Computing using time steps -- a necessary approximation
Time flows like a continuous, steady river. And it moves forward—never back. These facts create inherent challenges for computer simulations of biological molecules in motion.
It would...
Jun, 19, 2013
As barriers to massive imaging collections fall, researchers can look at human systems in their entirety rather than in pieces
In the beginning there was the Visible Human. It broke new ground by gathering some 2,000 serial images from a death row inmate’s cadaver, and was the first time researchers had sectioned a...
Jul, 01, 2007
From hardened software to scientific productivity, the NCBCs have changed the landscape for biomedical computing. What will happen when their funding expires?
It has been eight years since the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the first National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs). With two or three years remaining in the program (...
Oct, 19, 2012
Multi-scale modeling is now at what might be called its gestational stage
For centuries, mathematics has been an indispensable ally of the physical sciences and engineering. Planes fly and telephones work because engineers know how to simplify physical systems into...
Apr, 01, 2006
The edict that academics must “publish or perish” serves not merely to advance careers, but also to stress the importance of transmitting knowledge from scientist to scientist and...
Jan, 01, 2006
And people are starting to notice
In 1991, a prescient editorial in Nature by Harvard’s Walter Gilbert, PhD, (“Towards a paradigm shift in biology”) included these observations on the utility and impact of computing...
Apr, 01, 2006
How to share knowledge, data, tools, and computational resources in a sustainable manner
Once upon a time, a deep divide existed between scientists who did and those who did not have easy access to scientific content (journals, lectures, data), hardware (imaging devices, lab instruments...
Apr, 01, 2011