Era of biology

Current era is the most exciting time for biology research. I always like to compare this with early 20th century for physics when humanity were being surprised with never ending parade of discovery related to basic nature of matter and universe. Human quest with scientific rational thinking started with descriptive endeavor  to explain nature and natural phenomena. This was done by attributing cause effect relationship , hence delinking religious explanation with a possible rational thought.Eastern and western philosophers try to come up with rational explanation through observation, documentation and hypothesis generation. But they were lacking an important aspect of scientific quest - systematic experimentation.

The Renaissance period made a significant change in way humanity approach scientific problem. Newly found center for academic excellence and scientific societies played an important role in organizing and standardizing these efforts. One major shift in approach was to shift from system to single phenomena or reductionist approach. In this  approach, a single phenomena is studied in isolation then explained in terms of system. Such approach provided a fertile ground for experimentation. Furthermore provided a platform to formulate  specialized statistics and mathematics  to explain and quantify these results. Physics were earliest field to  adapt to these changes and completed integration of statistics , mathematics and experimentation by beginning of 17th century. Such integration lead to many discoveries including gravitation , planetary motion,electromagnetism to name few.This further expanded the possibility of exploration of natural physical phenomena and culminated in many major discoveries in 20th century like radioactivity, nature of matter, quantum physics and theory of relativity. Though biological research adapted reductionist approach and experimentation as early as physics but integration of statistics and mathematics were not attempted till end of 19th century my Gregor Mendal. This was first attempt to statistically explain an outcome of an experiment and explain deviation if any. This integration of experimentation with simple statistics allowed Mendal to come up with simple verifiable law, known “law of inheritance”. Immediate beneficiary of such integration was plant and animal breeding for improvement of crops and live stocks. This lead to development of new statistical tools like statistics based experimental design, randomization protocols and statistics  for hypothesis testing for sample and population.  Such attempt was made due to socio-economic compulsion to increase Crop and livestock production in response to increasing world population and increased need for food. Malthuvian theory further added urgency to increased need for food production. Meanwhile , scientifically such an effort do not require understanding of underlying basic molecular mechanism and was improvement over the practice of on going domestication and selection made such faster adaptation of statistical methods in crop and livestock breeding. Biological science was able to do targeted experimentation at molecular level after development of recombinant DNA technology  in 70s of 20th century. This lead to the way to manipulate DNA, RNA or protein ( Basic building block of life)  and hence capabilities to study cause effect relationship at molecular level. But one major hurdle was experimental approach which was still reductionist in nature. These molecule behave differently and differentially in test tubes and cells(which still i believe as In Vitro system). This brings to my starting point- why i think this is an exciting era for biology research? Four major unrelated development in biological science is currently attempting to revolutionize understanding of biological phenomena at molecular level. These techniques are making major changes in terms of research approaches and driving  studies from reductionist approach to a system based approaches. These major technological advancement   are low cost improved genome sequencing ( NGS) , improved microscopy and related mathematical tools for image analysis( Recently got Nobel prize), Remarkable improvement in mass spectroscopy  and CRISPR based genome editing. But optimum use of such revolutionary changes need new statistical approaches. Further this require dedicated workforce with understanding of experimentation and analysis. Such System-wide approaches are rapidly generating large number of new questions and shattering many established paradigms established by years of research with reductionist approaches. So ,in this changed scenario,  it is important to provide higher leverage to basic science research. Humanity was never so close to understand biology of humans and fellow creatures ever before. These powerful tools in armor with sufficient financial support will see revolutionary changes in human medicine , industrial enzymes, diagnostics and food. But current political impetus on Translational research to divert funding to research with immediate economical and social outcome may hamper this growth and humanity will be deprived of possible new approaches for many more decades.