Professor Denis Noble
University of Oxford

Abstract:

We no longer make airplanes, ships, bridges, and many other complex constructions requiring engineering science to make sense of the many factors that have to be taken into account, without modelling the structures and testing their anticipated performance. Why then do we develop new medications and new medical devices, without determining what their expected effects would be on the human body?

One answer is that the human body is vastly more complex than anything we have so far constructed. Perhaps the digital patient is ‘mission impossible'? Viewed as the challenge to reconstruct the human all the way from molecules upwards, the task does appear impossible. Just computing the interactions between the estimated 25,000 genes gives super-astronomical numbers of interactions: around 10 ^70,000! But the project is also ‘mission imperative' since it is precisely that degree of complexity that makes it necessary to solve the problem. We certainly won't meet the challenge by despairing of the chances of success.

Professor Dennis Noble's lecture will show that the very multi-scale nature of the challenge is also the secret of the way forward to success. In multi-scale networks of interactions, elements and processes at all scales can be causes. There is no privileged scale (Noble, 2012). He will outline how this approach can be made to work, how it has already succeeded in new medical developments, and what the mathematical and engineering challenges require as new methods and new ideas.

Reference:

Noble, D. (2012). A theory of Biological Relativity: no privileged level of causation. Interface Focus 2 55-64.