Today I was in London and visited Buzz Baum, a former boss of mine with whom I still do some work.
I was describing him my current research (some agent-based model of cancer somatic evolution) and explaining him the sort of simulations I was planning to study the system I had myself created. The idea was to test how a number of features in the environment of the tumour (nutrients, growth factors, etc) determine the sequence of phenotypes that tumour cells acquire. He went:well, that’s really interesting but I wonder if you could also make it so at after some timesteps you produce a deterministic mutation and see if that is going to make it more or less likely for a full cancer to develop
He was also interested in making the model less simple and more realistic (for instance, with realistic mutation rates) to see not only what is the sequence of mutations in a cancer with a given environment but also if, given a realistic mutation rate, what would be the likelihood of a malignant tumour?
Those were interesting questions over which I haven’t thought before. Maybe because my mind thinks in a particular way (undoubtedly) or because the literature I read is produced by mathematicians and not biologists (even though this mathematicians work with life scientists and we do also read our fair share of medical and biological papers) but it is always refreshing to have the take of a biologist on how to study a system.
I’ve always been interested in how scientists/researchers from different backgrounds (eg cancer biology vs computer science) are able to bridge differences in culture/jargon/ways of thinking. Have you found any difficulties in working with biologists when developing your models, due to these kinds of differences?
I just ran a story on NNB that gets into these issues a bit, focusing on physical scientists who decide to take the plunge and get jobs in biology departments.
This story you posted is very interesting and makes me thing in another difference between physicists/biologists and computer scientists/mathematicians. Whereas both life scientists and physicians study nature as a black box, trying to infer the laws from observations, computer scientists and mathematicians normally create our own systems. At some level a theoretical physicist is very similar to a mathematician so the logic would be the same whereas a experimental physicist would be akin a life scientist. To divide the camp more clearly, on one side experimentalist deal with nature thinking of her as a black box whereas we, theoreticians, have though of nice, clever, simple systems (algorithms, equations) in which we want nature to fit nicely.