Systems biology is an approach in biomedical research to understanding the larger picture—be it at the level of the organism, tissue, or cell—by putting its pieces together. It’s in stark contrast to decades of reductionist biology, which involves taking the pieces apart.

Yet with its complicated flow charts that can (in the words of T.S. Eliot) “follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent,” systems biology has scared away more than a few researchers. Still others fail to fully appreciate its usefulness because it lacks a concise, unified definition.

“There [are] an endless number of definitions,” said Ron Germain, chief of NIAID’s new Laboratory of Systems Biology, NIH’s first organized foray into systems biology, which has been nearly a decade in the making. “It’s even worse than the elephant,” that infamous elephant that stymies the attempts of blind men to describe it because each feels just one part.

“Some people think of it as bioinformatics, taking an enormous amount of information and processing it,” Germain said. “The other school of thought thinks of it as computational biology, computing on how the systems work. You need both of these parts.”

The new NIAID lab reflects an intellectual journey that Germain and some of his NIH colleagues embarked upon as the Human Genome Project was nearing completion.