Science fascinates me.  I love the excitement of making discoveries, breaking old concepts and creating new paradigms.  I have been a life scientist for almost 15 years and, through a variety of research interests I pursued, one single truth remained – a biological system is not simply a sum of its parts, but rather it is how the parts interact with each other and the environment.

Let me explain what I mean by this.  In biology’s genomic era we now know that it is not the number of genes that determines the complexity of an organism, but rather the interactions between those genes in multiple networks.  The same holds true in ecology, where the balance of a given ecosystem cannot be understood through the observation of a single species, or in nutrition, where the study of nutrients in isolation does not advance our comprehension about the role of foods in sustaining a healthy body.

In the fascinating book Nexus – small worlds and the groundbreaking science of networks, Mark Buchanan discusses the collective dynamics of the small worlds networks first described in 1998 by the mathematicians Duncan Watts and Steve Strogatz of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.  Their theory, largely based on Stanley Milgram’s web of interpersonal connections – the so-called ‘six degrees of separation’, shows that the social world is simpler than it appears and that you and I are connected through no more than six handshakes.  Anyone with a Facebook account can attest the veracity of the theory, since the evidence is right there – as your network of friends grows, so does the number of people whom you can reach with fewer connections.

More interestingly, as substantiated by some of your highly-connected friends, there are some people who are connected to many networks. Indeed, Watts and Strogatz noted the existence of central hubs that tend to dominate networks.  Such hubs are found in social, information and biological networks.

We are what we eat.  Nobody seems to question that.  However, can we ultimately apply the small-world idea and unravel the complexity of our body systems and the interactions between those systems and the food we eat?  If we learn how to find the central hubs and to connect the right dots, can we prevent and/or successfully treat cancer and other chronic diseases?  Is it possible to find the simplicity behind the apparent complexity of those networks?  Those are the answers I am after, and searching for those answers is a journey worth taking.

Are you with me?

As we celebrate the 10th anniversary of the sequencing of the human genome, an ambitious international collaboration project that started a decade earlier and officially “ended” on June 26th, 2000, I stop to wonder when the scientific community will be ready to deliver on some of its promises. As a recent article published in The > Read more…

My first attempt to write this blog was in 2009. I was passionate about science and wanted to share insights on the relationship between nutrition and health. What I could not figure out back then was specifically what to write about. There’s a bulk of information on the subject that seems to overwhelm all of > Read more…