Life is Complicated

Abstract

Success in the three conceptually related fields of metabolic engineering, drug discovery, and functional genomics rests on understanding, or discovering, the relationship among activities encoded on particular genes and the phenotype of the organism. In spite of detailed catalogues of complicated networks in individual cells, in turn embedded in additional layers of complicated signalling systems in cell populations, assuming that biology is simple is common, as manifested by the terms “rate-limiting step”, “drug target”, and “function of a gene.” All of these naive concepts are based on the assumption that a single gene’s product has a simply understood and substantial effect on the function of an organism. Why do these simplistic concepts and approaches survive, and to a large extent dominate, contemporary science, pharmaceutical research and development, and biotechnology investment? The answers seem to be: (i) these concepts sometimes work (particularly at the peripheries of cellular networks, e.g. within unbranched terminal biosynthetic pathways, or for certain receptors), and (2) not enough people so far understand otherwise.