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Maths is important because mathematics is the quantitative language of science, or is the language of quantitative science.
If ever you're dealing with complex systems, and the body is surely complex,
you need to be able to use methods that properly quantify
function and structure, and mathematical models are the way that you do that.
The heart work began when we started looking at the fibrous structure of the heart.
Because the heart is made up of of muscle fibres that typically change their, these are myocytes,
they change their angle as you move across the wall of the heart and
what we discovered was that the fibres are in fact coupled together into sheet-like structures and the,
both the direction of the fibres and the direction of that strong collagen coupling into sheets
is very important in terms of the mechanical and electrical properties of the heart.
But then we teamed up with Denis Noble in Oxford to bring his ion channel work into that context,
and on top of that we then layered the, all the electrophysiology, in terms of being able to look at the coupling between
electrical activation and mechanical function.
The importance of developing new instrumentation to make new measurements that we need, particularly at the physiological scale.
One of them is the ability...this is funded by the Wellcome Trust, and it's an instrument that allows us to
mill off a section of tissue and then confocally image and then build up,
and you can do it on little segments of tissue and then piece them together so you can build up a very detailed picture of say,
the structure of collagen, this is work that's been led by Bruce Smaill, a colleague of mine in Auckland.
And building up a picture of the detailed structure of the tissue, which we can then characterise mathematically,
has allowed us to make sure that the models are reflecting the reality of this complex tissue structure.
One of the big challenges at the moment is linking to molecular biology and particularly molecular systems biology.
So there's been an enormous effort over the last 50 years, we've gained enourmous knowledge of molecular processes.
And the attempts to deal with the complexity at that level for the signaling pathways, metabolic pathways, gene regulation, and so on,
has led to the development of what we call molecular systems biology which is, again, trying to deal with complexity through modelling.
And that's a community that, on the whole, doesn't need to worry too much about structure whereas, in physiology, you really do have to worry about anatomy and structure.
So one of the big drives at the moment is to connect all this physio modelling down to the molecular systems biology,
and be able to take advantage of things we know down at the molecular level,
together with what we can measure and observe up at the physiological scale.
I think physiology has a tremendous future in terms of making sense of all the data that's now been generated by 50 years of molecular biology.