What I learned about systems biology was that it countered the reductionists. You shouldn’t just say – oh, it’s the liver. The liver is a player in multiple systems, each with multiple components, each contributing its own bias, angle, and input. By reducing everything to such superficial simplicity, we risk unintended consequences by, for example, prescribing a pill. Systematic is not about that systems biology. On a much more microbial scale, Systematic describes how components support or defeat each other, in isolation of everything around them.

It begins with basic bacterial biology, and moves up only as far as proteins. It is an enjoyable voyage of discoveries, puzzles and anecdotes, which leave the reader fascinated, impressed and very much more informed on this nascent, gigantic field.

Systematic is about building microscopic factories that produce sensors, timers, medicines and new molecules by inserting and mixing pieces of DNA into bacteria and other cells. It’s about harnessing the immune system to do prescribed battle, not just its own. It’s about treating, reframing and creating proteins to achieve very small changes – that can save lives. Our bodies provide the tools for all that.

Valcourt relates many discoveries. My favorite is grid cells and place cells, first discovered in lab rats. The rats wander their cages, unconsciously tracing out patterns in the form a triangular grid. Place cells signal when a location is recognized. Humans have them too, and they are, for example, among the first to go in Alzheimer’s disease, leading to the feeling of being lost. It tells us how really very little we know about how things work.

Systematic bothers me because it still isn’t really systems biology. It dives so deep it misses the larger relationships. We still focus on killing cancer cells without killing healthy cells, when it might be more productive to prevent the epigenetic changes that probably trigger it in the first place (let alone abandoning the diets that encourage it uniquely in our society). If we master the entire system, we might see the factors that cause DNA or RNA to order up proteins that implement cancerous growth. Instead, Systematic is still all about targeting the symptoms and defeating the disease. That’s not systems biology.

David Wineberg ( )