Theory in Biology: Figure 1 or Figure 7?
- Creators
-
Phillips, Rob
Abstract
The pace of modern science is staggering. The quantities of data now flowing from DNA sequencers, fluorescence and electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, and other mind-blowing instruments leave us faced with information overload. This explosion in data has brought on its heels a concomitant need for efforts at the kinds of synthesis and unification we see in theoretical physics. Often in cell biology, when theoretical modeling takes place, it is as a figure 7 reflection on experiments that have already been done, with data fitting providing a metric of success. Figure 1 theory, by way of contrast, is about living dangerously by turning our thinking into formal mathematical predictions and confronting that math with experiments that have not yet been done.
Additional Information
© 2015 Elsevier Inc. I dedicate this brief essay to Eric Davidson, friend and colleague, who always insisted on concepts over facts. I am grateful to Stephanie Barnes, Nathan Belliveau, Justin Bois, Griffin Chure, Angela DePace, Tal Einav, Hernan Garcia, Jeremy Gunawardena, Soichi Hirokawa, Greg Huber, Jane Kondev, Madhav Mani, Ron Milo, Muir Morrison, Andrew Murray, Arjun Raj, Manuel Razo, Allyson Sgro, and Jacob Shenker for useful discussions. I am privileged to be entrusted by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), The California Institute of Technology, and La Fondation Pierre Gilles de Gennes with the funds that make the kind of theoretical work described here possible. Specifically, I am grateful to the NIH for support through award numbers DP1 OD000217 (Directors Pioneer Award) and R01 GM085286. I am also grateful to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics where this essay was written, for their generous support. Finally, the referencing provided here is cursory and intended to guide the reader to the literature and does not attempt to provide a scholarly assessment of the many excellent contributions not cited here.Additional details
- PMCID
- PMC4666001
- Eprint ID
- 62445
- DOI
- 10.1016/j.tcb.2015.10.007
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20151130-110111581
- NSF
- Caltech
- La Fondation Pierre Gilles de Gennes
- DP1 OD000217
- NIH
- R01 GM085286
- NIH
- Created
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2015-12-03Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field