This section contains reviews of books related to technology, systems, medical reform, and health.
The End of Medicine. Andy Kessler.
Andy is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and VC with much success to his credit. His very readable book details how imaging and diagnostics will bring scale, efficiency, and automation to medicine. Best vision that I’ve seen so far, although he only mentions systems in passing.
Introduction to Systems Biology. Dr. Uri Alon.
This book is by far the simplest and most straight forward. Dr. Alon understands the notion of patterns (motifs) that make complex systems simpler. Indeed, his book is the closest to the “Gang of four” pattern book that every OO programmer has on his desk. Not there yet, as Dr. Alon acknowledges, but a really excellent start.
Systems Biology: Properties of Reconstructed Networks. Bernhard O. Palsson.
Palsson does an excellent job at providing historical context for SB and calls for the establishment of standards. He should also be congratulated for calling for an effort to map the hierarchy of the system—its “Enterprise Architecture” if you will. On the down side, he misses a fundamental point on page 23: the amino acid code is not random, but rather, it is optimized for the laws of Shannon Entropy. Also, he is still reluctant to recognize that the system is “designed” to insulate itself from stochastic effects associated with thermodynamics. He emphasizes that the system is “constrained” by the laws of chemistry. Not a useful way to look at it. He also engages in endless arbitrarily complex math regarding optimal states. A dressmaker just uses the pattern book because the patterns are useful. She doesn’t whip out any differential equations to prove it.
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John M. Vlissides
This book is better known for its authors, the “Gang of four”. If you’ve ever designed software you’ve seen this book. Ultimately, this book has to cover everything in carbon-based systems, too. It has to do with Information entropy. I don’t think that the biologists are generally hip to this fact yet.
