Denis Noble
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Denis Noble is one of the pioneers of systems biology.
Noble was educated at Emanuel School and University College London http://noble.physiol.ox.ac.uk/People/DNoble/ where he obtained his PhD under Otto Hutter Noble 2006. In 1958 he began his investigations into the mechanisms of heartbeat. This led to two seminal papers in Nature in 1960 giving the first proper simulation of the heart. Remarkably it became clear that there was not an oscillator which controlled heartbeat, but this was an emergent property of the feedback loops in the various channels. He obtained his PhD in 1961.
From 1984 to 2004, he was the Burdon Sanderson Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology, University of Oxford, a Chair financed by the British Heart Foundation. He is now co-Director of Computational Physiology. His research is focussed on using computer models of biological organs and systems to interpret function through from the molecular to the whole body levels. With its international collaborators, his team has used supercomputers to create the first virtual organ, the virtual heart. As Secretary-General of the International Union of Physiological Sciences 1993-2001, he played a major role in launching the Physiome Project, an international project to use computer simulations to create the quantitative physiological models necessary to interpret the genome.
He was awarded a CBE, and made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1979http://royalsoc.ac.uk and an honorary FRCP (Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians).
He is author of The Music of Life which explains some of the basic aspects of systems biology, and debunks the ideas of genetic determinism and genetic reductionsim which have taken hold in the popular mind. He points out that there are many examples of feedback loops and "downward causation" in biology, and that it is not reasonable to privilege one level of understanding over all others. He also explains that genes in fact work in groups and systems, so that the genome is more like a set of organ pipes than a 'blueprint for life'.
Publications
- The Music of Life (2006) OUP ISBN 0-19-929573-5
Sources
- Royal Society Website (for date of FRS)
External links
- http://noble.physiol.ox.ac.uk/People/DNoble/
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