“I often say, when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it. But when you cannot measurement, you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind. It may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the term may be.”
-Quote attributed to William Thompson, 1st Baron Kelvin
Based on the quote above, one can probably infer Lord Kelvin probably wouldn’t have considered biology of his time a “science.” This quote is attributed to a lecture he gave in 1883, a time when foundational terms in biology such as evolution, genetics, and bacteria had just started to enter the zeitgeist.
However, advances in biology itself, as well as measuring instruments and data analysis mean that the biology of 1883 and the biology of today are radically different. A powerful example of the power of quantification in biology was demonstrated in 1952, when Hodgkin and Huxley published their differential equations describing neuron spiking. These differential equations were able to make solid predictions about the sodium and potassium channels found in neurons based on electrical measurements and quantification. Other advances of quantitative methods–such as in computational neuroscience and mathematical ecology have been foundational to the birth of multi-level perceptrons and chaos theory, respectively.
Bytes from the Cell is the summary of my adventures to explore mathematical and quantitative approaches to biology and medicine. Considering the vastness of the field which it is trying to summarize, Bytes from the Cell does not attempt to form a coherent narrative nor does it aim to be definitive. The articles are not organized such as in a book, but are rather intended to be akin to Wikipedia articles which fall inside a greater framework of ideas. Together, it is hoped that these articles can paint a sparse portrait of this thriving field.