ABSTRACT
Consideration of emergence in the cell raises various issues. The first is the widespread and non-rigorous use of the term by biologists. What is true in all branches of science is more evident in biology, where the common language is used for most scientific descriptions. A rapid examination of the occurrence of the word emergence in biological articles fully demonstrates this polysemy. The first oscillations to be experimentally demonstrated in the 1960s were oscillations in the concentration of components of metabolic pathways, such as the glycolytic pathway. It is rather difficult to understand why these observations attracted so much interest at the time. The late attribution of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1978 to Peter Mitchell for the chemiosmotic model, seventeen years after he proposed it, is often considered a defeat of the reductionist view of biochemists. Systems biology has deep roots in the past, and its importance was vigorously advocated by von Bertalanffy.
