Senior Author

In 2002, Roger Brent, director and president of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, secured a US$15.5-million grant to define every chemical reaction in yeast's biochemical pathways. The paper published online this week (doi:10.1038/nature03998) presents the first results of this ‘Alpha Project’. Brent took some time out to talk to Nature about his work.

Where does this finding fit in with the total goal of the Alpha Project?

In some sense, it's equivalent to an electrophysiology experiment in the 1930s. We're establishing baselines to how the gears in the cell work. This is kind of like the first electrode.

Isn't there some controversy about whether your approach, which measures small variations between similar cells, is useful or just a detection of ‘noise’?

There has been a great deal of noise about noise in the scientific literature over the past five years or so. In this work, we're trying to distinguish between how one cell transmits more than another. It's important to make that distinction between pre-existing cell-to-cell variation and noise in the gear work.

How different is your approach to other methodologies in systems biology?

I only use the term ‘systems biology’ with great reluctance. I dislike the phrase because the waters are very muddy. You don't just pile up an inventory of things and the waters became clear. But the Alpha Project, at the end of the day, is looking at a system.

How difficult was it to establish the multidisciplinary environment for this work?

The country is being run by biologists. The biologists outnumber the immigrants (mathematicians, computer scientists, chemists and physicists). The immigrants will enrich us. We will all be better for it. The biologists can't be xenophobes; the biologists can't ghettoize. The lingua franca is English. On good days there aren't riots.

You teach an undergraduate course, aimed primarily at non-scientists, called ‘Genomics and citizenship’. What's its aim?

The course is about four things. Here's what you need to know about molecular biology; here's something you need to know about how you know that — how experiments are done; here's what you need to know about the structures of the places where this stuff plays out; and here are some ways you can think about these things. What we ideally want to do is teach people enough so that they can make informed political opinions, or so that they can ask the right questions.