The reductionist approach of molecular biology has given us detailed descriptions for many biochemical constituents of complex biological systems. For some of the simpler systems nearly the entire "parts catalog" has been assembled. These developments have set the stage for a new generation of questions -- questions of integration that deal with the relation between behavior of intact systems and their underlying molecular determinants, questions of unifying design principles that will give meaning to the bewildering diversity of alternative molecular designs, questions of higher-level theory and quantitative prediction, which currently are not available in most of biology. The motivation to develop this new perspective comes from the study of complex biochemical pathways, intricate circuits of gene regulation, network interactions within the immune system, plasticity of neural networks, and pattern formation by cellular networks. All these networks consist of more elemental constituents that find their meaning within the context of the intact system. The integrative perspective requires a new language and methodology. The objective of this text is to systematically develop these and to apply them to specific classes of metabolic networks and gene circuitry. The applications demonstrate the power of this approach to formulate and answer fundamental questions concerning network function, design and evolution that currently cannot be addressed by other methods. The text was first published in 1976 and is being reissued to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the author's first paper published on Biochemical Systems Analysis.
About the Author: Michael Savageau, Distinguished Professor, The University of California Davis, holds degrees from The University of Minnesota (B.S.), The University of Iowa (M.S.), and Stanford University (Ph.D.). He was a postdoctoral fellow at both UCLA and Stanford University prior to joining the faculty at The University of Michigan. Dr. Savageau initiated Michigan's interdisciplinary training program in Cellular Biotechnology and its interdisciplinary Bioinformatics Program. He also chaired the Department of Microbiology and Immunology from 1992-2002 and was named the Nicolas Rashevsky Distinguished University Professor in 2002. After moving to the University of California Davis in 2003 he chaired the Department of Biomedical Engineering from 2003 to 2005. His honors include Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Senior Research Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows, Foundation for Microbiology Lecturer, American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques Award, Moore Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, Member of the National Academies of Science Institute of Medicine, 79th Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecturer for the American Mathematical Society, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow, and Stanislaw Ulam Distinguished Scholar Award from the Center for Non-Linear Studies, Los Alamos National Laboratory. The author was Editor-in-Chief of Mathematical Biosciences from 1995 to 2005, and serves on advisory panels for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Keck Foundation, and the National Academies of Science. He lectures extensively in the US and abroad on his research, which is focused on mathematical methods for the comparative analysis of function, design and evolution of gene circuitry.