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The 10th International Conference on Molecular Systems Biology (ICMSB 2008) will be held at the University of the Philippines — Diliman Campus from February 25 to 28, 2008. It will follow the tradition of nine previous workshop-style meetings that have focused on theoretical and methodological advances in biological systems analysis, their applications, and their support through novel software development.            

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ICMSB 2008

10th International Conference on Molecular Systems Biology
February 25-28, 2008, University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City

HISTORY

 

 

Systems biology has become a buzzword in recent years.  Apparently out of nothing, a new field emerged, and within a few short years, many researchers from biology, physics, computer science and other fields of endeavor declared themselves systems biologists. Articles appeared, books were written, educational programs were created.  Fueled by the scientific community and the lay media alike, the expectations for systems biology grew sky high.  Are they based on fact or fiction?  Is systems biology all hype, or are the enormous expectations and predictions warranted?

            

             To get a glimpse of the future, it is useful to look into trends of the past.  There we quickly find that the term system biology may be new, but that its roots can easily be traced back to earlier times.  As a case in point, the Austrian scientist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy must be recognized as a pioneering, visionary systems biologist, as his work from the 1920s to the 1960s contains uncounted discussions of systems in biology that even today are still modern, relevant and interesting.  Beginning in the 1980s, easier access to computers empowered growing numbers of researchers to explore systems in biology than ever before and small communities of like-minded systems biologists started to assemble.  In 1989 one such group organized the first conference in a series of which the upcoming ICMSB 2008 meeting is the tenth. This inaugural conference in Charleston (U.S.A.) honored the 20th anniversary of Biochemical Systems Theory, one of the first mathematical and computational forays into representing and modeling biological systems in a suitable and general fashion. Reviewing the series of subsequent conferences demonstrates in a nutshell how ideas for analyzing complex systems began to blossom, and we are beginning to fathom how powerful close collaborations between biologists, mathematicians and computer scientists can be and what they may accomplish in the future. The complexity of systems that can be modeled today is easily a magnitude higher than at the first conference, and the speed with which our methods improve suggests that we may soon be able to analyze biological systems with hundreds of components and processes.

            

             So, is systems biology all hype? Certainly not. Systems biology will not solve all biological problems in a few years, and patience an persistence are of the essence. But deep thinkers of the past century have paved the way, giving us the opportunity to explore an uncharted and exciting territory that promises us solutions to some of mankind’s grand challenge problems in biology, medicine, and sustainable stewardship of the environment.

 

                                                                                           — Eberhard Voit