Gene Myers, Max Planck Institute, Dresden, Germany

Why Networks Are Not Enough
To most people "Systems Biology" conjures up the idea of interaction and regulatory networks.  Surely knowing all the genes and their interactions will tell you the story.  Actually, while it is certainly a prerequisite, this talk will illustrate as strongly as possible that the cell and cellular collections are complex, natural nano-machines whose biophysical, and spatio-temporal properties are as important, if not more important than "the network".

Being overwhelmed by this complexity, this author began ten years ago to embark on a program of developing methods for the direct observation of these processes with microscopes and the quantitization and modeling of the observation via image analysis techniques.  The second half of the talk will illustrate what is possible and where we hope to go in the future.