Molecular Biology... What Molecular (systems) Biology
The great efficacy and productivity of the reductionist approach of preand post-genomic Molecular Biology has yielded an overwhelming accumulation of detailed biological data at molecular level, leading to an accumulation of new data at higher rates than those required for their processing to transform these data in new information and finally in actual new knowledge.
Abstract
Copyright: © 2012 Medina MÁ. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The launch of a new Molecular Biology journal can induce questions as: Is it necessary a new Molecular Biology journal? What kind of Molecular Biology journal? The overwhelming number of molecular biology articles currently published and the high number of molecular biology journals currently available are both a reality and a sign of the relevance the discipline Biochemistry and Molecular Biology has achieved in the scientific world. Undoubtedly, Molecular Biology has played an essential role in the great scientific-technological revolution of recombinant DNA, which has allowed in less than thirty years to push Biology up to its privileged current position as the leading science at the forefront or XXIst Century research. The enormous success of Molecular Biology and DNA recombinant technology, along with the emergence of Bioinformatics allowed for the launch of a full battery of genome projects in the nineties leaded by the Human Genome Project. Its goals were reached 15 years in advance of previsions thanks to a big step ahead of available molecular biology technologies allowing for the first time in Biology a true high throughput and high content analysis of data. Post-genomic Molecular Biology has yielded the emergence of so many “omics” (proteomics, transcriptomics, interactomics, and metabolomics, among others) as to warrant the validity of the motto “Put an omics in your (scientific) life”. At the beginning of our current century it began to appear clear that Molecular Biology could “die” because of its enormous success. On the one hand, the great efficacy and productivity of the reductionist approach of preand post-genomic Molecular Biology has yielded an overwhelming accumulation of detailed biological data at molecular level. This has occurred at more and more accelerated rates, leading to an accumulation of new data at higher rates than those required for their processing to transform these data in new information and finally in actual new knowledge. On the other hand, this enormous advance in detailed molecular knowledge has not been accompanied by an equivalent advance in our degree of understanding of functional processes in living beings. Reductionism is based on the Cartesian principles of analysis and synthesis, according to which complex problems can be divided into an array of simpler problems to be autonomously analyzed, with the assumption that the summation of partial solutions could give account for the solution of the whole problem. Reductionism also assumes the Occam’s razor principle, according to which when there are several alternative possible solutions the simplest one has the highest probability to be the true one. However, neither the Cartesian principles nor the Occam’s razor principle can always be applied to complex biological systems. In their influential end of millennium essay “From Molecular to Modular Cell Biology”, Hartwell et al. [1] envisioned a needed change within the hard core of reductionist molecular biology towards “new” systemic, holistic approaches able to assume that emergence pervades all biological systems: