Systems Biology

In this thesis, I discuss the development of systems biology and issues in the pro-gression of this science discipline. Traditional molecular biology has been driven by reductionism with the belief that breaking down a biological system into the funda-mental biomolecular components will elucidate such phenomena. We have reached limitations with this approach due to the complex and dynamical nature of life and our inability to intuit biological behavior from a modular perspective [37]. Mathematical modeling has been integral to current system biology endeavors since detailed analysis would be invasive if performed on humans experimentally or in clin-ical trials [17]. The interspecies commonalities in systemic properties and molecular mechanisms suggests that certain behaviors transcend specie differentiation and there-fore easily lend to generalizing from simpler organisms to more complex organisms such as humans [7, 17]. Current methodologies in mathematical modeling and analysis have been diverse and numerous, with no standardization to progress the discipline in a collaborative man