SDSSB Comments 2 - Systems Biology and Science Policy

As science and technology deemed important in the progression of humanity, scientific findings moved from “individual artist” in their own laboratory into today’s global scientific society with its culture and policies. Science has come to be an important thing: it is a country’s asset, the driver of new business and industries, and a way to make a living for academia. Therefore, a science policy can affect different aspects not just in the scientific society.

As implied in Macilwain (2011), the investigation to understand how living things work has come to a change of approach, evolved from the reductionist view into the more holistic view of Systems Biology. It promises to bring more sophisticated and complete understanding of human biology, enabling advances in predictive, personalized, preventive and participatory medicine (Hood et al., 2009). This has led the funding bodies to “invest” in Systems Biology, creating new centers around the globe.

The sad story of the MIB (Bain et al., 2014) shows how science policy have a big impact in the development of a research field and the people working in it. Indeed, modelling the Yeast cell is a key to understand how a human cell works, and ultimately “how to battle cancer”. Living cells are not the easiest to work with, but promises need to be fulfilled to the funding agencies. It is then, through research grant reports, the policy makers decide which sector need to be pushed forward or not.

Todays science policy maker are government and Industry. They want the output of research which benefits the country or the business. But the nature of science itself is uncertainty. Scientists jump into uncharted waters, trying to get new knowledge for humanity. But this knowledge may not be beneficial in a clear way. Even “failures” give important information for science to progress.

Does our science policy are the best way to make progress in Systems Biology? Working on systems biology to model living systems indeed have uncertainty aspects of the outcome, but if the science policy is to fund research with a “clear beneficial output”, then it may limit the possibility to explore the “uncharted waters” of biology. Does our science culture (where PI and researchers employed compete for science funding) is already established or it needs to be revolutionized?