ABSTRACT
I don’t work in the field of complex systems analysis per se, although I work on a complex system. So this gives me the opportunity to relate a story. The man who was my advisor as a freshman in college, a Professor named Jack Miller, a well known nuclear chemist, told me two things which were very influential in my life. The first, which was very reassuring, is that every professor only gives one lecture; they change it to conform to the circumstances, but they really only know one lecture, so I don’t have to feel guilty telling you about just what I know about. The second thing he did was taught me was not to become a biologist, which wasn’t permanent, but it was helpful at the time. So I work on the human genome, which I guess is a good example of a complex system, and I’ll relate two anecdotes, to try to give you some focus for this meeting. We have 100,000 genes. Each one is a set of instructions to make a protein. And we today essentially know at least a snippet of the information, about almost every one of them. This has gone much more rapidly than people thought when the genome project was started because the technology got better. Within a couple of years we’ll probably know all of those genes in their entirety. So we have a complete parts list almost to the human, and we do have a complete parts list for about 10 to 15 simple organisms. However, we don’t know what most of those parts do. So it’s a very embarrassing situation to be in, although we’ll find out eventually. But we do know that extremely subtle differences in those parts have dramatic consequences, and that the spectrum of these differences is 30much more elaborate and complicated than anybody thought in 1985 when all this started. For instance, there’s a gene called p53 (it’s a terrible name) that is altered in many cancers. We know something about what this gene does—but the thing that’s frightening about it is there are already 6,000 different point changes that have been detected in that gene in different people. And those changes lead to different cancer presentation. It’s not clear which changes are cause and which are effect, so one has to be careful. But just in this one case alone, sorting out the mess is going to be remarkably time-consuming.
