The availability of high-throughput techniques opened a new epistemological era in biology. New disciplines such as genomics, functional genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and structural biology leveraged these technological advances to deepen our understanding of cellular physiology and regulation. The need to extract knowledge from these large data streams stimulated the development of computational techniques to store, organize, mine, and model the data, facilitated by the increasing availability of cheaper computer hardware and improved performance. These developments led to the emergence of the umbrella discipline of computational systems biology (Kitano 2002). The initial intent and motivation underlying the large resources and funding devoted to this major effort was to enhance human health. The human genome project (HGP), where the bulk of the work was conducted between 1990 and 2003, and which successfully led to sequencing the entire human genome, is arguably the...