 Although not all systems biologists put equal emphasis on the prospects of big data, there is a general acceptance in the community that mathematical and computational approaches are required to account for biological complexity. The first international conference on systems biology was held in 2000 (at the first Systems Biology Institute in Tokyo), and thematic journal issues and dedicated journals quickly followed (Kitano 2002a,b). Since then, many systems biology research institutions have emerged, and large-scale international collaborations have been initiated.