No I can't provide a link. My indirect source is Robert Rosen, in his books Life Itself and Essays on Life Itself. My direct sources are various other rumblings I'm hearing from within "the biological community," as reported to me by a theoretical biophysicist friend who is working on the development of complex systems theory. I gather the common complaint increasingly has been, "we've got mountains and mountains of data. What we lack is a suitable biological theory or model by which to probe it." Occasionally, such comments make the press. But not usually.
As my friend has written,
Nowadays the vital need to develop a solid basis for complexity sciences and biology is in the focus of scientific efforts. The US National Science Foundation realizes this is a key challenge, and promotes the development of theoretical biology and complexity science as one of its top priorities. “We have accumulated very many details about biological events in the all, but due to a lack of a theory of biology, we very much narrow down the path on which we can proceed to understand life processes.… The US National Science Foundation has allocated in this fiscal year 1.8 billion dollars for theoretical biological physics.” (Ladik, 2004). “Today, by contrast with descriptions of the physical world, the understanding of biological systems is most often represented by natural-language stories codified in natural-language papers and textbooks…. But insofar as biologists wish to attain deeper understanding (for example, to predict the quantitative behavior of biological systems), they will need to produce biological knowledge” (Brent and Bruck, 2006). “Promoting research that encourages a holistic perspective to ‘understand complex systems’ is a long-term investment priority in the strategic plan of the National Science Foundation of the United States” (Hübler, 2007). ...[W]e [need to] develop an approach to a proper foundation of theoretical biology suitable to dispel the “growing frustration” that “can be observed in the community of biologists” (Brent and Bruck, 2006).In short, IMHO (FWIW) HGP was a flop because its model — ultimately premissed in the Newtonian formalism — wasn't up to the job. It cost a ton of money to learn this lesson. So I do hope we have learned it.
Thanks so much for writing, grey_whiskers!
Just thinking of the idea (debugging, sensitivity analysis for the parameters) gives me the willies.
Then the cells into an organ...
Then the organs into an organism.
Then tweak various "objects" to mimic faulty genes or disease processes.
We'd need "Deep Thought" (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) to begin to model it.
Cheers!
Would it be too presumptuous to characterize the problem as follows?
We might consider the genome as a book; and the net effect of the HGP was that it transcribed the letters from the book into a computer database. And thus you have a bunch of computerized letters, collected in the order in which they appear, which is pretty swell -- an excellent resource.
The problem, of course, is that the letters aren't actually the point of the book at all; nor is the particular order in which they appear necessarily going to confer any deep knowledge to a reader who doesn't know the language, much less the ideas that the language is trying to express. The value of a book is that there's a meaning and a context to the book that far transcends the collection and pattern of those letters, that mere transcription cannot capture. We can't just look at the letters and understand the concepts, abstractions, the book contains -- much less the puns.
The analogy would seem to apply as well the compilation of DNA's letters. Merely having them confers no knowledge of what information they contain, nor what they mean when taken together as a system.
Moreover, a simple transcription of the letters and patterns does not address how the book is intended to be used ... the purpose of a phone book, for example, is different from that of the Bible or a text on topology. Even the chapters of a book have different applications.
Here I am drawing an analogy with respect to the interactions between the DNA code, and the mechanisms of the cell that actually operate on and with the DNA. Those cells provide a specific context for specific portions of the DNA -- in a very real sense the cellular mechanisms represent information that seems to me to be separate from, and perhaps even broader than, what the DNA itself holds.
If the HGP "failed," perhaps it failed by assuming that simply collecting letters would be enough...?