"Complexity Is Winning"

At Ars Technica Robert Fortner writes that "synthetic biology does away with systems biology's untidiness by focusing on individual parts" but as it goes about that, it "rediscovers the complexity it hoped to escape." Fortner then looks into the work coming out of the Institute for Systems Biology and Lee Hood's protégés, as well as from other groups and companies. But they all seem to be coming up against the problem of complexity. "Although synthetic biology begins at the bottom and looks up, it eventually comes face to face with the same complexity that systems biology sees peering from the top down," Fortner writes. "In either direction, the more we look, the more we find. In the pincer movement of systems and synthetic biology on complexity, complexity is winning."