Theory in Biology: Figure 1 or Figure 7?

Abstract

The pace of modern science is staggering. The quantities of data now flowing from DNA sequencers, fluorescence and electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, and other mind-blowing instruments leave us faced with information overload. This explosion in data has brought on its heels a concomitant need for efforts at the kinds of synthesis and unification we see in theoretical physics. Often in cell biology, when theoretical modeling takes place, it is as a figure 7 reflection on experiments that have already been done, with data fitting providing a metric of success. Figure 1 theory, by way of contrast, is about living dangerously by turning our thinking into formal mathematical predictions and confronting that math with experiments that have not yet been done.