RT Book, Section
A1 Loscalzo, Joseph
A2 Jameson, J. Larry
A2 Fauci, Anthony S.
A2 Kasper, Dennis L.
A2 Hauser, Stephen L.
A2 Longo, Dan L.
A2 Loscalzo, Joseph
SR Print(0)
ID 1156522148
T1 Network Medicine: Systems Biology in Health and Disease
T2 Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, 20e
YR 2018
FD 2018
PB McGraw-Hill Education
PP New York, NY
SN 9781259644016
LK accesspharmacy.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1156522148
RD 2024/04/23
AB The  field  of  human  biology  has  progressed  over  the  last  three  centuries  largely  as  a  result  of  the  reductionist  approach  to  the  scientific  problems  that  challenge  the  discipline.  Biologists  study  the  experimental  response  of  a  variable  of  interest  in  a  cell  or  organism  while  holding  all  other  variables  constant.  In  this  way,  it  is  possible  to  dissect  the  individual  components  of  a  biologic  system  and  assume  that  a  thorough  understanding  of  a  specific  component  (e.g.,  an  enzyme  or  a  transcription  factor)  will  provide  sufficient  insight  to  explain  the  global  behavior  of  that  system  (e.g.,  a  metabolic  pathway  or  a  gene  network,  respectively).  Biologic  systems  are,  however,  much  more  complex  than  this  approach  assumes  and  manifest  behaviors  that  frequently  (if  not  invariably)  cannot  be  predicted  from  knowledge  of  their  component  parts  characterized  in  isolation.  Growing  recognition  of  this  shortcoming  of  conventional  biologic  research  has  led  to  the  development  of  a  new  discipline,  systems  biology,  which  is  defined  as  the  holistic  study  of  living  organisms  or  their  cellular  or  molecular  network  components  to  predict  their  response  to  perturbations.  Concepts  of  systems  biology  can  be  applied  readily  to  human  disease  and  therapy  and  define  the  field  of  systems  pathobiology,  in  which  genetic  or  environmental  perturbations  produce  disease  and  drug  perturbations  restore  normal  system  behavior.