We Can Design Cars, But Why Can’t We Design Cells?
Apr 26th, 2008 by Axel
Let’s suppose that, knowing nothing about cars, you wanted to learn how they worked. You happen to have a friend who is an auto mechanic, so you ask him to explain cars to you: How do they start? How does burning gasoline make the engine go? How does the force generated by the engine get transferred to the wheels? Imagine that in answer to your questions, your mechanic friend brings you to an auto parts shop and begins to take parts off the shelf, explaining to you what each one is. By the end of the little lesson, your friend had shown you every piece that goes in your car and explained its function. Do you now know how a car works?
Well, no. Even if you could recite what each part does, you probably still have a poor understanding of how the parts work together to make a vehicle go. Let’s take a more extreme scenario: you are teaching a class full of aspiring automobile engineers, and you want to teach them how to design cars. Would you teach them by just going through all the car parts one by one? Maybe you could even bring it all together at the end of the class and show them some diagrams of the parts put together: the chassis, the electrical system, the drive train. But even with the diagrams, these would-be engineers still won’t be able to show up for work at Mercedes and design the next state-of-the-art engine. Parts lists and diagrams aren’t enough; as any engineer can tell you, you need to get quantitative, you need to understand math and physics, and you need to be able to build model engines on computers, models which you can then test in silico without actually trying to physically build every new idea for an engine.
In many ways, molecular biologists are like that class of auto engineers.