Jeremy Gunawardena
Director, Virtual Cell Program
Harvard Medical School
In-Silico Biology: promise and peril
Biologists can now acquire biological knowledge, of a restricted kind having to do with gene sequences, by sitting at a computer and running a program. What comes next? Will biologists be able, someday, to perform virtual experiments, as some have suggested, so that in-silico biology comes to be on a par with in-vivo and in-vitro biology? I will survey some of the challenges and pitfalls that lie along this road, which takes experimentalists and theoreticians into uncharted territory.