One version of the 'hockey stick graph', which depicts rising temperatures, as used by the IPCC in 2001.
Credit: IPCC
In my case, after more than 40 years of drilling down on narrow mechanisms, I now begin to comprehend how they together control that interface between viral and vertebrate genomes we call infection.
Take influenza, for example, which is generally most severe in the very young (no pre-existing immunity) and in the elderly as our immune systems fail with age.
Sometimes, however, we see a rapidly fatal disease outcome in healthy, young adults and only recently we have realised that in these cases a massive over-reaction occurs in the early 'innate' response.
We've known for years how antibodies and killer-T cells, which attack the virus-infected cells, work to protect us. This response is modulated by specialised molecules, called chemokines or cytokines. However, when excessively produced in these young adults, cytokines can cause severe vascular leakage and shock.
These people drown in their own lung fluids. In order to know what might be done medically, we need to understand which mechanisms should be enhanced or suppressed, perhaps with new drugs or bio-therapeutics.
Trying to deal with such issues has drawn us into the new, complex science called systems biology.
Over the past decade we've seen the sequencing of the human, mouse and other genomes, an extraordinary expansion of 'chip' technologies that allow massive data acquisition via laser-drive reader systems and enormously enhanced computing for the analysis of massive data sets.
The numbers are made freely available online, so that others can analyse parameters that are of particular interest to them.
We experimentalists would be lost without the skill sets of PhD astrophysicists and mathematical/computer wizards who've come across into biology. Their input in pulling together the vast spectra of inter-related data, drives the new sub-disciplines of genomics, proteomics, glycomics, lipidomics, transcriptomics and so forth.
Such 'discovery' science isn't going to replace traditional 'reductionist' approaches where we've identified a cell or molecule of interest and then gone in depth to understand what it actually does, but it does point-up a whole spectrum of new targets and inter-related mechanisms for detailed attention.
That's why contemporary biology is so exciting and why, for example, Australia can't afford to cut back on funding basic research in the molecular sciences.
Another great area of complex analysis that is of central importance for human wellbeing is climate science. Will our species survive the next millennium or so?
Understanding what is happening globally requires – as with complex biology – the specialised analysis of massive, inter-related data sets.
