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I'm Denis Noble, Emeritus Professor of cardiovascular physiology in the University of Oxford
and I work on the heart.
David Paterson: So Denis, this is a great place to stop, by these musical instruments.
Denis Noble: They're lovely, aren't they?
DP: Because you can probably guess the question I'm going to ask you.
DN: I think I know where you're leading to.
DP: I'd just like to talk about 'The Music of Life'. DN: Right.
DP: Because I'm really interested in your motivation as to why you wrote this book, to start with.
DN: Well first of all, that if one thinks that life is a process,
not just the components, the genes and proteins, then
what is the best metaphor for a process, it's surely music?
The notes following one after the other in a sequence that only makes sense,
as a sequence, as a process, so that was one motivation.
The other though was that it seemed to me that what had happened, roughly speaking,
around the year 2000, was that people had realised that physiology was necessary.
But they didn't call it physiology, they called it systems biology. So my book is actually about systems biology.
But of course what it says in the effect is that that is what physiology is.
DP: What has been the response of the wider community to this?
DN: Very interesting question there David, very interesting question
because, what is it, seven years after publication? There is still no systematic response.
No one has replied.
It's as though you sent a message out there and you're still waiting for it to come back.
DP: I'll have a chat to Richard Dawkins. DN: I think you should, yes, exactly.
DP: On the whole science has moved in a very reductive way... DN: Exactly so.
DP: ..what we get done, to atomic structure now, we've got our proteins, we've got our genes,
we spatially can't go much further so what do physiologists have to now do?
Because it seems to me we have all the bits and pieces out there but we've got to...reassemble them.
DN: It is the central challenge of biology and I think physiology is right in there because
it deals with the analysis of function, function is central to working this out.
DP: So really what we're getting to now is how do we define function... DN: Well yes. DP: ...with physiology?
DN: Very big question, we're not very clear about what it means because on the one hand we have
function that you and I would interpret, for example, as the the mechanism of the heart,
the mechanism of the pump, the mechanism of the circulation.
On the other hand, there is this definition of function that says it's for this,
it's for that, and that's why it's evolved.
And somehow we have to find a way of bringing those two concepts of function together.
In the end, function is for something even if there isn't something up there that said it should be for that function,
it's still for some function.
DP: So there's still plenty of work for physiologists?
DN: Absolutely so, we're at the beginning of a very exciting period, is my view.