European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research

Since the advent of Systems Biology at the turn of the century, a plethora of approaches, opinions, definitions, etc., on its meaning and significance have emerged. Notwithstanding this multitude, there are some clear lines to be drawn between an empirical, local approach that is close to previous
molecular research and a more idealistic, global approach that has more affinities with some typical systems approaches. Various proposals, such as the “research cycle” by Kitano, were made in order to establish a fruitful working methodology hoping that both traditions can meet each other “in the
middle”.In addition to this debate, there is the dichotomy between structure and function, which is of equally importance to Systems Biology. Because of new high-throughput technologies, that produced huge amounts of structural data, molecular biologists were forced to turn to global approaches in order to make sense of the data. By doing this, however, they lost the biological meaning and relevance of certain local processes and are stuck with the global, structural interpretations of the data.The challenge, so will be discussed, is to think of the appropriate relationship between the global and the local level, the idealistic systems approach and the empirical biological approach, between structure and function The question is how they can be related with each other without falling into a reduction to one or the other level.


Principal contact
Joris Van Poucke
Veli-Pekka Parkkinen