Can a biologist fix a radio?

Reading a paper from way back in 2002: Can a biologist fix a radio?—Or, what I learned while studying apoptosis, Yuri Lazebnik in Cancer Cell.

To understand what this flaw is [in how biologists approach problems], I decided to follow the advice of my high school mathematics teacher, who recommended testing an approach by applying it to a problem that has a known solution.

Taking the biological approach (hypothetically) to fixing a radio by securing funding, buying lots of identical radios and doing things like removing components to see what breaks.

Going this route, some things can be fixed: burnt out components. Some things cannot, such as tuneable elements.

Yet, we know with near certainty that an engineer, or even a trained repairman could fix the radio. What makes the difference? I think it is the languages that these two groups use (Figure 3)

Uploaded image — Figure 3 from the paper: “A: The biologist’s view of a radio […] B: The engineer’s view of a radio. (Please note that the circuit diagram presented is not that of the radio used in the study. The diagram of the radio was lost, which, in part, explains why the radio remains broken.)”

The engineer uses standard language, can identify common patterns, and uses quantities (capacity, voltage). And so:

[…] I hope that it is only a question of time before a user-friendly and flexible formal language will be taught to biology students, as it is taught to engineers, as a basic requirement for their future studies.

I find all of this highly appealing, and I probably need to spend more time with something like An Introduction to Systems Biology text or course.

biology systems