Metamorphosis: the Coming Transformation of Translational Systems Biology: In the future computers will mine patient data to deliver faster, cheaper healthcare, but how will we design them to give informative causal explanations? Ideas from philosophy, model checking, and statistical testing can pave the way for the needed translational systems biology.

Abstract

One morning, as Gregorina Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, she discovered that she had become afflicted with certain mysterious flu-like symptoms that appeared without any warning. Equally irritating, this capricious metamorphosis seemed impervious to a rational explanation in terms of causes and effects. "What’s happened to me?" she thought. Before seeing a doctor, she decided to find out more about what might ail her. She logged on to a Web site where she annotated a timeline with what she could remember. Since March, she’d had more headaches than usual, and then in April she had begun to experience more fatigue after exercise, and as of July she had also experienced occasional lapses in memory. "Why don’t I go back to sleep for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness," she thought. As she was about to abandon this errand, the system came back to life with a barrage of questions: Is she female? Had she experienced any significant stress in the past few months? Had she noticed any joint or muscle pain? It also obtained her permission to download her genomic profile.

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Life and medical sciences

    • Computational biology

    • Systems biology