Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 11-15 of 19
 Wrong title and a poor exposition of biology July 5, 2009
A. Ciapata
7 out of 18 found this review helpful
This is a typical book written for physicists to help them understand terminology that appears to be relevant to biology. First sentence of Chapter 2 (beginning of the book proper; Ch 1 is an Introduction) states that ... "The cell is integrated device made of several thousand types of interacting proteins. Each protein is a nanometer-size machine...." So, for the author, as for most physicists outside biology, the cell can be imagined as a machine composed of an arrangement of interacting smaller machines. This very statement-definition can perhaps satisfy physicists learning elementary biology but it has nothing to do with systems biology. As a matter of fact systems biology appears to be entirely devoted to these concepts of "interaction" and "integration" that INHERENTLY cannot be explained by machine metaphor as a single conceptual model. (Examples of this systems biology paradigm can be found for instance in This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World or, even more so, in Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life (Complexity in Ecological Systems) and in authoritative texts on systems biology such as Systems Biology: Principles, Methods, and Concepts.) Therefore, from the beginning I suspected that "systems biology" in the title of this book is a mistake. Reading the entire book has convinced me that the text is about physical or physics-inspired interpretations of ALREADY EXISTING models of selected biochemical situations. If the title of this book would be "Statistical physics of biochemical models", or a nicer worded equivalent thereof, I would have much fewer problems with this publication. However a couple of serious additional problems would still remain. One of these REALLY SEVERE additional PROBLEMS is the use of the word "design" everywhere in the book. It is essential in science to make a clear distinction between phenomena and their models. Systems biology proper, as we know it today, is largely devoted to maintaining such distinction. To the contrary, this book is based on a systematic violation of this essential distinction [examples of violation include a discussion of "biological circuits" and the "principles of design" (thereof)]. So again the book advocates a very poor habit of thinking that (historically speaking) used to work in physics but does not help in biology. To the contrary, the iron discipline in distinguishing natural phenomena from their models is important in all biology research while in systems biology it is THE CENTRAL FOCUS of scientific activities.
I do not recommend this book to anyone interested in systems biology as a field of science devoted to studies of life itself.
 An Amazing Book April 17, 2009
Jason Dowd (Los Angeles, CA)
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
If you have any interest in how life actually works, you should read this book. It weighs in at less than 300 pages, which makes it very approachable. But it manages to pack a wide array of fascinating material into those pages.
Life is complicated. And there is no reason to expect it to be readily comprehensible. Yet over the last few decades we have found that biological systems make extensive and repetitive use of certain patterns of functionality, and that these patterns often embody good design principles as practiced by human engineers.
Concepts such as modularity, robustness, and even optimality are found to be reflected in biological systems and exploitable to make verifiable predictions about how biological systems operate experimentally.
It is worth noting that while this book is deeply fascinating, it is not math free. Indeed the author began his career as a mathematician and the reader will find it helpful to have some knowledge of basic ordinary differential equations, calculus, and elementary algebra. On the other hand, very little if any biochemistry is required.
Fascinating! January 31, 2009
Yegor Voronin (Seattle, WA USA)
4 out of 7 found this review helpful
What a great book! If you have any interest in how biological systems function and what principles lay in their most basic designs, you must read it!
It's very clearly written. I think almost everyone will find it accessible and interesting, no matter what your education level is or your primary field (but I think engineers will get a particular kick out of it). There is quite a bit of math, but it's very basic and even if you skip all of it, you will still learn a lot from the book.
I found the whole subject fascinating and intriguing. Sure, biological systems are not as simple as this book may seem to portray, but there is no doubt in my mind that the ideas presented here are quite relevant to biology and indeed underlay many of the real-world biological phenomena.
Awesome book January 10, 2009
eyeinzsky75 (US)
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
Awesome book! The author did a great job in presenting the topics in an easy and enjoyable way.
Excellent serious book about biology -- no chemistry needed. July 23, 2008
George Stanton (New York, NY USA)
23 out of 26 found this review helpful
This is a great book for learning about how biology works. I've been wanting to learn a bit more about biology, and I've read many of the popularized science books on the subject. Most serious biology books require a pretty good understanding of organic chemistry. (At first that didn't seem like a problem, after all organic chemistry is just regular chemistry with a bunch of carbon atoms lying around, but the jargon gets so dense that you lose track of what's going on.) This book offers an entirely different perspective on biology that is much more accessible to someone with a general interest in science.
This book looks at biology from the perspective of how genes and proteins interact at a network level, rather than a chemical level. It's a lot like learning electronics -- you can understand a lot about a transistor without knowing how semiconductors work. After explaining the operation of some of the most common network "motifs" the author talks about why those motifs were favored by evolution, in particular what makes them robust and how can they act to minimize errors. The book leaves you with the very interesting question of what characteristics might be different between an engineered system and an evolved one?
The language of the book is very clear, this is a technical book you could easily read for fun. The math is simple, just a little calculus, and if you don't care about the math you can just look at the diagrams.
Showing reviews 11-15 of 19
|
