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Systems biology, big science and grand challenges

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Abstract

Systems biology is currently one of the most prominent large-scale endeavours in the life sciences, so it might be considered to be a good example of ‘big science’. Further analysis shows, however, that although systems biology does make use of huge quantities of data, requires large amounts of funding and is highly interdisciplinary and collaborative, in other respects it does not fit comfortably under the heading of big science. I suggest that we need to adopt new policy categories if we want to understand the dynamics of the contemporary life sciences. The term ‘New Biology’ has been used to identify recent changes. New Biology involves the integration of many different disciplines, and, importantly, it is oriented towards addressing major societal needs or ‘grand challenges’. I ask: if ‘big science’ was the language of the twentieth century, are ‘grand challenges’ the language of the twenty first? I end by arguing for the increased involvement of the social sciences and humanities in the formulation of grand challenges.

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Notes

  1. ‘Making it Big? Tracing collaboration, complexity and control in the biosciences’ Exeter, 17–18 March 2011.

  2. Zhang et al (2011) list 39 reports published since 2004 on synthetic biology and its implications.

  3. I am exploring these issues in other work (see Calvert, forthcoming).

  4. The title of the report is similar to Woese’s (2004) well-known paper ‘A new biology for a new century’, and Woese’s ideas are cited in the NRC report.

  5. We should, of course, be sceptical of anything that claims to be ‘new’. Molecular biology similarly brought together biologists, physicists, chemists and mathematicians to address biological questions in the 1940s and 1950s, and the beginning of the twentieth century saw the rise of ‘general biology’, which aspired to combine many different strands of research (Powell et al. 2007).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gail Davies, Emma Frow, Sabina Leonelli, participants at the ‘Making it Big’ workshop in Exeter in 2011, and the anonymous referees for their comments on this article. The work on which this article was based was carried out at the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Egenis) at the University of Exeter, and the ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics (Innogen) at the University of Edinburgh. The support of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) is gratefully acknowledged.

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  1. Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, University of Edinburgh, Old Surgeons’ Hall, High School Yards, Edinburgh, EH1 1LZ, UK

    Jane Calvert

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Calvert, J. Systems biology, big science and grand challenges. BioSocieties 8, 466–479 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2013.27

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