James Watson and Francis Crick worked out the structure of the DNA double-helix at Cambridge University, announcing their much-celebrated discovery in a modest one-page letter to the journal Nature that was published 50 years ago today.

Not long after, the American-born Watson made it back across the Atlantic to the other Cambridge, where he joined Harvard’s faculty in 1956. His coming brought molecular biology to Harvard, a discipline that has seen explosive growth and advancement in the past 50 years.

Molecular biology takes a reductionist approach to living things, breaking them down into their smallest moving parts.

Despite the success of such reductionism, some scientists now find that reductionism is not enough to solve some of the most important problems in biology.

Instead of trying to understand the minute physical details of life, scientists have now begun to explore the complex ways in which networks of proteins interact in cells.

It’s the network, not the double helix, that is attracting the attention of more and more scientists. Fifty years after the structure of DNA invigorated the molecular biology revolution, a new more integrated approach to understand cells is gaining prominence.

This approach, called systems biology, is increasingly important in biological research at Harvard.

It’s All About Networking

The final draft of the human genome was announced this month. But the function of most of the raw sequence—a string of the nucleotide bases A,C, T and G—is still mysterious.

“Most of the information that’s encoded is completely obscure to us,” says Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology William M. Gelbart. “It’s as if we unearthed some ancient tablet but you can’t read most of it, because you don’t have the dictionary.”

Now, the task for scientists is to study how these bases of DNA are grouped into genes, and how these genes help produce proteins that interact to keep a cell alive.

Researchers have long known how to find the function of specific genes, which is akin to knowing the dictionary definition of a word. Finding all of the words, and figuring out how they fit together is the goal of the network approach to biology.

“Interactions you wouldn’t dream of are being discovered,” says David Jeruzalmi, assistant professor of molecular and cellular biology. For example, it was recently discovered, he said, that ten genes interact to contribute to alcohol addiction.

“We’re not going to understand what’s going on in a cell unless we more or less look at what’s going on simultaneously,” he says.

Harvard’s main investment in this integrated approach to biology is the Bauer Center for Genomics Research, which was dedicated last year. According to Bauer Center director Andrew W. Murray, researchers at the center seek to eventually gain a comprehensive understanding of complete biological systems. He says that take a system-based approach “will tell us in some complicated way how biology is put together.”