The 2013 Nobel citation expresses that “Today the computer is just as important a tool for chemists as the test tube”. That statement is perhaps truer today of biologists, as computation and modelling have taken centre stage in the post-genomic era.
Teaching systems biology
It is easy to convince students about the primacy of a systems approach. But how does one get going? Well, as it turns out, a web browser can be quite handy today, enabling us to tinker with models and ask interesting “what-if” questions. Such questions, which seek to understand the effect of perturbations on networks, form the cornerstone of systems biology.
