In a classic cartoon, a physician offers a second opinion from his computer. The patient looks horrified: How absurd to think that a computer could have better judgment than a human doctor! But...
Jan, 01, 2010
The complexity and variability of aging itself, along with the fragmented nature of researchers’ current understanding of aging, call for tools that can help scientists dig through mounds of data to find often subtle connections.
Jeanne Louise Calment of Arles, France rode a bicycle until she was 100 years old. When she gave up smoking at age 117, her doctor suspected it was out of pride. (She couldn’t see well enough...
Apr, 01, 2008
On the computer screen, vessels throb realistically with each pump of the heart while the river of blood swirls and pools at curves and intersections. This is a simulation built with SimVascular...
Apr, 01, 2007
Having developed detailed and sophisticated models of both E. Coli and human metabolism, researchers can begin to build toward a whole cell model that will be useful for the study of human health and disease.
If biologists really understood the functioning of the genome, they could in principle recreate it in silico. Instead of a choreographed swirl of molecules inside a living cell, electrons...
Oct, 01, 2008
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
A ten-year, $600-million program known as the Protein Structure Initiative (PSI) has already, in its five year pilot phase, greatly increased the speed at which protein structures can be determined,...
Jun, 01, 2005
Biomarker research, genetics, and imaging are all coming into play
In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tübingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing...
Oct, 01, 2007
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
Pursuing the frontiers of systems biology in an interdisciplinary, non-academic enviroment
The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) was founded in Seattle, Washington in 2000 by Leroy Hood, MD, PhD, Alan Aderem, PhD, and Reudi Aebersold, PhD. Five years later, they are pursuing the...
Apr, 01, 2006
Modelers should take the lead.
Many collaborators 1 with whom modelers2 work have little or no training in modeling3 and so it is natural that they may be cautious,...
Jun, 05, 2012