It's also my conviction that you will learn something new and important about your biological system in the course of a single semester. I have seen this happen so often when a modeling project is undertaken, that I confidently predict it will happen to you. We are not here to obtain precise estimates of minor parameters. We are here to test major hypotheses and to discover features of your biological system that no one has previously discovered. The truth is that I am an integrative bioinformatics evangelist.
Modern biomedicine is in the midst of a sea-change.
The power of reductionism is fading in the face of enormous complexity. This complexity demands powerful tools. The computational tools of integrative bioinformatics and modeling are becoming palpably essential if we are to have any hope of understanding the function of a single cell, much less the physiology and pathophysiology of whole organisms. This is not to say that we already have all the computational tools we need. But it is to say we have some good tools and we are working hard to build better ones.