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- Thank you so much Professor Levchenko for being with us.
- Thanks a lot Doro for inviting me.
- So Systems Biology is a relatively new field,
and I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about
what science used to be like before Systems Biology
and how Systems Biology has sort of evolved science.
- Yes, so science has been primarily dominated
by the concept of reductionism where we try to, you know,
Biology but in other fields as well,
we try to see if we can break down a system
to some fundamental small elements with parts,
study them separately from each other,
and try to reconstruct how the system works.
And it has done a lot of very important things,
has brought about a lot of really important notions,
but we believe that in the end,
we cannot truly understand the functional of the parts even,
let alone the whole system by looking at the parts
separately, we believe that systems need to be looked at
as systems reconstituted, but also, you know,
brought back to life in some sense through feedbacks,
interactions and synergies.
- And so what are some of the novel insights
for new discoveries that this approach of Systems Biology
has allowed scientists to make or discover?
- So I think the notion of the interacting parts
is very important if you try to understand
how certain drugs, for example, work.
Again based on reductionist point of view, you can say,
well, here's a mutation, here's something that I can do
to try to fix it either through genetics
or through some chemicals.
The problem is that in a system, even if something's broken
or if you really try to just look at the single part
of the system, you may miss truly important interactions
with other parts
and the system frequently reorganizes itself
after something's broken, so when you try to fix it
frequently it doesn't work, it doesn't certainly work
with many of the drugs they're trying to develop.
So our insights very recently have been a lot
about how these drugs may work and more importantly,
how they don't work and how we can think about it
and find frequently that it's all about these feedbacks
that I mentioned, this interactions between parts.
And so first we understand a little bit better,
and more importantly, we find new ways to get around
this problem and frequently by looking at many parts,
developing combinatorial interventions.
- So it's a really exciting time.
Maybe you could share with us a bit about
what got you into science
and what gets you up every day to come to work.
- Yeah, so I,
I think it's very important thing to think about every day,
what gets you up and what brings you back to work,
especially when, you know, sometimes it's very hard.
I think for me, it's a couple of things,
one of which is, the sense of discovery I always get
when I'm realizing that we sometimes look at something
that has not been either seen before or appreciated before.
So, you know, we got to, we get to discover new things,
we get to understand things in new ways.
For me personally, it's a huge, huge bolus of energy
and excitement, but also, you know,
as I started my path in science, I have always been
somehow close to the clinical environments.
I did my PhD at a hospital and again,
every day I walked through rows with patients that are
either outside or inside the hospital,
and you see with your own eyes,
the dire need for, both understanding, but what we,
what may go wrong in our bodies, but also fixing that.
And so I think we're all motivated by this,
but for me personally, it's also very,
very strong motivation.
- Absolutely, well thanks so much for being with us.
- Thank you, Doro.
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