Denis Noble: The Failure of The Gene-Centric Paradigm

Denis Noble is a world-renowned British biologist most well known for his contributions to systems biology. During his time as a Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology and Emeritus Professor of Computational Physiology at Oxford, Denis pioneered the use of novel, nonlinear models of physiology that see the phenomena of emergence as fundamental, rather than a mere curiosity. He has been an outspoken critic of the gene-centric approach to health and disease that has remained orthodoxy since the discovery of the double helix by Watson and Crick in the 1950s.

With complex, living systems endowed with the capacity of dynamic self-organisation, Noble argues that genes cannot cause disease, as they are embedded within a set of interactions between the organism and its environment; relationships that contextualise the transcription of genes. Rather than viewing genes as determinants of outcomes, they are merely part of a chain of interactions where information flows from the environment to the highly flexible organism.