Music of Life by Denis Noble. Summary. Part I.

Molecular biology has advanced quite rapidly in the past few decades, especially after the discovery of the DNA in 1953. However, in order to gain the fruits from this significant scientific leap, the reductionist molecular and genetic approach is not enough, explaining why the benefits from molecular biology in health care is relatively slow compared to the advances in this interesting scientific field. This book is about systems biology, where the author focuses on the fact that it is not possible to understand the logic behind the system from studying the system’s components only. The molecular and cellular components are in fact interacting in a balanced symphonic harmony which Noble calls the music of life.

“Do you not know that our soul is composed of harmony?“, Leonardo da Vinci

Pushing calcium ions out of cells is an example of an important low level biological process, since it is used as a controller of many processes in cells and organs. It is involved in the pacemaker rhythm of the heart, the secretion of insulin by the pancreas, the transmission of impulses in the brain, and many more. There are specific genes which code for proteins required to push calcium ions out of cells. Thus, considering this simple example, if we try to map low level biological processes to higher level functions, we would end up in an almost endless number of recombinations. Therefore, it is very hard to map genes to higher level biological functions. Instead, there is an urgent need to consider the interaction between these low level processes to bring up the higher level functions, a branch of science known as systems biology.

The author introduces a nice metaphor about how really can genes explain what we call life. A person is sitting in a quiet room listening to a beautiful piece of music, and as the music entered the slow movement, he started crying. Imagine that there exist some hypothetical creatures, which he calls silmans, since they are made of silicon instead of carbon. They watch from outside and try to understand the event of crying by reducing it into all the sound effects, loudspeakers, CD player, and so on. And then one of them claims that he has found the clue, it is all about the digital information on the CD which causes the man to cry. Without the digital information the event would not have occurred, moreover, if this information is altered by mutation, the man may have a completely different response, he may even get angry. Though this sounds really funny, we use similar ways of reducing our life which is full of interactions and emotions, into a four-letter code (A, T, C, and G) embedded in our DNA. Any possible damage or mutation in our DNA can lead to serious problems, like the CD example. However, we are almost sure that the digital information on the CD is not the only reason behind crying, it is actually the whole context of the person who is listening, including all his memories, feelings, and real life interactions.