This post opens a series following Uri Alon’s systems-biology course. First, why this course, and where to get everything for free.
Why this course
Uri Alon, a physicist turned biologist at the Weizmann Institute, teaches life the way an engineer reads a circuit. Rather than cataloguing molecules, he asks which wiring patterns keep recurring in living cells, and why. Out of that come a handful of design principles that make the messy cell suddenly legible: network motifs, robustness, optimality. It is, as I argued elsewhere, one of the fields that actually made good on general system theory’s old promise.
Watch the lectures (free)
Alon’s full 2018 course was recorded and posted online, free.
- YouTube playlist: Systems Biology 2018
- Course page, with lecture videos, exercises and solutions, and lecture notes: weizmann.ac.il/mcb/alon/courses/systems-biology-2018
Lecture 1, basic concepts:
The book (optional)
The course follows his textbook, An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits (2nd edition, CRC Press 2019). Unlike the lectures it is not free, but the course stands on its own.
The plan
From here the series works through the course lecture by lecture.