Denis Noble

Denis Noble ( born November 16, 1936) is a British physiologist. He is among the pioneers of Systems Biology.

Denis Noble was educated at University College London, where he received his doctorate in 1961. Written in his highly acclaimed doctoral thesis, from the two articles in Nature, he developed the first mathematical model of the working heart. Noble had from 1984 to 2004 the Burdon - Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University held. He is now Emeritus and Co-Director of Computational Physiology at Oxford. As Secretary-General of the International Union of Physiological Sciences ( IUPS ), he was one of the initiators of the Physiom project in which, through the setting up of quantitative models and their solution by computer simulations, the interpretation of genome data should be encouraged.

In 2006 he published with The Music of Life, the first popular science book on systems biology. In this he criticized the ideas of genetic determinism and reductionism, as he most radically in some followers of Dawkins' selfish gene theory is. He makes the case that due to various feedback mechanisms (eg, splicing, epigenetics ) the genome not be emphasized organizational level, there is no program, derived from the in reductionist approach, the function of "higher" levels as those of the proteins, cells or even organs could be. Instead, he proposes a systemic view of organisms.

Writings

  • Initiation of the Heart Beat, 1975
  • Electric Current Flow in Excitable Cells, 1975
  • Electrophysiology of Single Cardiac Cells, 1987
  • Goals, No Goals and Own Goals, 1989
  • Sodium - Calcium Exchange, 1989
  • Ionic Channels and Effect of Taurine on the the Heart, 1993
  • The Logic of Life, 1993
  • The Music of Life, 2006
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