“All of what science does is study some smaller part of science in a way that they hope will be relevant,” he says. “The only difference now is that the size of the part we are studying has gone up.”

Laura Garwin ’77, director of research affairs for the Bauer Center, says the more comprehensive approach to understanding how DNA directs the functions of the cell should not overshadow the importance of the reductionist approach used so successfully by Watson and Crick, and thousands of others.

“The big revolution that started in 1953 was a reductionist revolution,” she says. “And that was a success because it’s only by understanding what’s going on at a fundamental level that you can understand what’s truly going on.”

But the continuation of a details-based approach, she says, would be similar to a blind man’s quest to understand an elephant by feeling one small part of the elephant at time.

“The only way you can really know what the elephant is like is if you look at the whole elephant,” she says. “What we had until recently was just a list of the parts. But a list of the parts is just the bare minimum for what you need.”

She said that without new technology, however, scientists would have been incapable of taking a systems-based approach, which involves studying hundreds or even thousands of processes in the cell simultaneously.

Microarrays Lead the Way

One crucial piece of technology for understanding biological networks is the DNA microarray, invented in the early 1990s.  The microarray allows scientists to determine, all at once, the relative levels at which genes are expressed in cells.

Bauer Center Research Fellow Hans Hofmann uses the microarrays to analyze gene expression in cichlids, a type of fish.

Some of the fish are territorial and aggressive, while others fish are docile and spend more time eating. The fish Hofmann studies are special, however, in their ability to change their nature. They can transform from an extremely aggressive territorial fish to a well-behaved non-territorial fish.

To study how this change happens, Hofmann takes material from fish’s brains and uses it in microarrays.

“If you only looked at a single gene, you wouldn’t get the sum total of what’s going on in the fish to help make the transition,” says Garwin.

Hofmann says that knowledge of this “sum total” is necessary to study of all the genes in an organism, called genomics.

“Genomics means to be more integrated, to put more things together, to get a comprehensive understanding of what’s going on in the animal,” says Hofmann. “Genomics is a highly comparative science.”

Before technology such as DNA microarrays enabled scientists to study many genes at once, experiments were much more tedious and less efficient, according to Garwin.