Director of Research & Development,     Center for the Study of Biological Complexity, Virginia Commonwealth University

For the bulk of the history of biology and biomedicine, reductionism was the principle mode of investigation. While Ecologists caught on to the idea of systems in the late 1800's, Systems Biology, as a discipline, has not really emerged until the past decade when "omic hierarchical" data became readily available in online databases and through various for sale databases. In today's presentation, we will examine the idea of networks from assorted persectives and address the question of "What can networks tell us anyway?" Examples will be drawn from a variety of organisms and disciplines.