Denis Noble

Denis Noble FRS (born November 161936) is an eminent British biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University from 1984-2004 and is now Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is one of the pioneers of Systems Biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960^[1]. His research focuses on using computer models of biological organs and organ systems to interpret function from the molecular level to the whole organism. Together with international collaborators, his team has used supercomputers to create the first virtual organ, the virtual heart.

Noble was educated at Emanuel School and University College London (UCL)^[1]. 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. From this work it became clear that there was not a single oscillator which controlled heartbeat, but rather this was an emergent property of the feedback loops in the various channels. In 1961 he obtained his PhD working under Otto Hutter at UCL^[2].

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.

Awards and recognition

His major invited lectures include the Darwin Lecture for the British Association in 1966, the Nahum Lecture at Yale in 1977 and the Ueda lecture at Tokyo University in 1985 and 1990 along with his victory in 1991. He was President of the Medical Section of the British Association 1991-92. He was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1988 and an Honorary Fellow in 1994, an Honorary Member of the American Physiological Society in 1996 and of the Japanese Physiological Society in 1998. In 1979 he was awarded a CBE, and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society

Views on reductionism

His 2006 book The Music of Life examines some of the basic aspects of systems biology, and is critical of the ideas of genetic determinism and genetic reductionism. 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".

He contrasts Dawkins's famous statement in The Selfish Gene ("Now they [genes] swarm ... safe inside gigantic lumbering robots ... they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence") with his own view: "Now they [genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence". He further suggests that there is no empirical difference between these statements, and claims that they differ in "metaphor" and "sociological or polemical viewpoint"^[3].

Publications

Books

• Initiation of the Heartbeat, 1975, 2nd Edition 1979
• Electric Current Flow in Excitable Cells, 1975
• Electrophysiology of Single Cardiac Cells, 1987
• Goals, No Goals and Own Goals, 1989
• Sodium-Calcium Exchange, 1989
• Ionic Channels and the Effect of Taurine on the Heart, 1993
• The Logic of Life, 1993;
• The Music of Life (2006) OUP ISBN 0-19-929573-5

See also

• Nature versus nurture

Sources

• (for basic biographical information) Who's Who 2004.

References

External links

• Denis Noble

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