A Revolution in Research and Development — The Impact of Biotechnology

As the biotechnology industry has evolved over the past decade, so too has our definition of biotechnology. High-tech industrialization has increased the efficiency of certain activities to levels that would have been difficult to imagine only ten years ago. Instead of assigning individual scientists to work manually on small-scale experiments, industrial and academic researchers now invoke automation and parallel processing to conduct experiments of much greater scope and complexity, and at a much faster pace. The data that result are correspondingly of immensely greater value, both in terms of quantity, as well as quality. Enormous databases now afford views of biological processes of a comprehensiveness so far without precedent. As a result, researchers are increasingly able to understand the properties of biological systems rather than simply of individual parts. This ability to understand complex processes in their entirety has allowed researchers to shift their focus from observation and description to the development of overarching theories and models. This new view of biology is called “systems approach.”

System biology is not concerned with investigating individual genes or proteins one at a time, but rather with investigating the behaviour and relationship of all elements in a particular biological system while this system is functioning. The Human Genome Project was one of the first modern biological endeavours to practice biology systematically. System biology differs from hypothesis-driven science, which creates hypotheses and attempts to distinguish between them experimentally. Integrating these two approaches — discovery-based and hypothesis-driven science — is one of the mandates of systems biology.