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‘Music of Life’ plays at 2008 Festival of Research

Renowned scientist Professor Denis Noble CBE, told the audience at the annual UCD Conway Institute Festival of Research on 25th September 2008 about the complexity of human biological systems – what he refers to as ‘the music of life’.

Since scientists have discovered how to sequence the human genome there has been immense excitement about the possibilities that are opened up by being able to understand human biology at the molecular level. The potential for the healthcare industry is perhaps the most obvious, with predictions that we would soon be able to identify the genes responsible for a variety of illnesses or conditions and therefore target them with new drug therapies.

But progress on this has been far slower than first imagined. Denis Noble sees this as a result of a nearly too-intense focus on science at the molecular level. We now have a very good understanding of many biological molecules - how they’re made and what they do - but we have been less successful in seeing how these molecules interact together in processes that govern entire living systems. Denis Noble now says it is time to take the approach of “integration rather than reduction”. We need to scale up rather than down.

It is this approach that underpins the relatively new discipline of systems biology, an area where UCD and the Conway Institute are working particularly hard to establish critical mass in Ireland. Professor Noble can rightly be regarded as the pioneer of this scientific approach, which involves using mathematical and computational methods to help us to understand enormously complex biological systems.

His book "The Music of Life: Biology beyond the Genome" is the first popular book on this subject, and he uses the analogy of music to explain his thinking. Like music, biological systems are much more than simply the sum of the molecules or ‘notes’ that are part of their structure.

Professor Noble has spent much of his career working to understand these systems. In 1960 he published the first computer model of the human heart – using computational processes to interpret function from the molecular level up to the whole organism – in this case a virtual organ. At the UCD Conway Institute Festival of Research, Professor Noble used this computer modelling of the heart to illustrate what he sees as the ten guiding principles of systems biology. The tenth principle is that there are many more yet to be discovered – “a genuine theory of biology does not yet exist”. Far from giving us the blueprint of life, therefore, sequencing the human genome has simply allowed us to better understand some of the instruments involved in playing ‘the music of life’.

Systems biology also featured in the lecture given by Professor Ralf Baumeister, University of Freiburg, where he spoke about being able to use an interdisciplinary systems biology platform to understand how protein networks operate in situations of aging and disease like Alzheimer’s or Parkinsons. Professor Nicholas Turner of the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre opened the Festival of Research with his lecture on the directed evolution of enzymes – speeding up the work of nature, with obvious implications for the pharmaceutical industry.

The 8th Annual Conway Festival of Research was an unqualified success. Over 160 abstracts were submitted for display in the poster exhibition, while there were eight oral presentations and twenty moderated posters throughout the day. Lydia Lynch, obesity research group in the Education & Research Centre, St Vincent's University Hospital won the 2008 UCD Conway research medal, sponsored by Roche. Her presentation centred on her research entitled; "The policeman of the abdomen no longer undercover: the humun omentum reveals itself as a unique immune organ, which is compromised in obesity". Second and third prizes went to Michael Johnston and Michelle Nic Raghnaill. Poster prizes were awarded to Colm Duffy, Terence Bukong, Sinead Toomey and Jacqueline Whyte.