Harvard Medical School said yesterday that it was setting up a
new department, the school's first in two decades, devoted to
the emerging field of systems biology. Many biologists,
especially those who use computers to understand the complexity
of cellular processes, have started to call their work systems
biology. Harvard Medical School said its department, with 20 new
faculty members, would be one of the first department-level
systems biology programs in the country. Systems biology, in
part an outgrowth of work on the human genome, is an effort to
understand the complexity of living cells by studying whole
networks of genes or proteins. Human cells have 40,000 or so
genes, and each can produce one or more different proteins.
Controlling all these components is no easy task and over the
course of evolution, the cell has developed sophisticated
networks of genes for regulating the various processes in its
repertoire. Understanding these processes requires studying sets
of interacting genes and proteins as a