Making Computer Systems Reveal Biological Secrets

Making Computer Systems Reveal Biological Secrets: "Two of the hottest areas of scientific discussion these days are computational science, the intersection between computer science and other sciences, and systems biology, the effort to decipher the code of the human genome.

Andrew Phillips gets to work in both.

Phillips, a scientist who works for Microsoft Research Cambridge, is working with stochastic pi-calculus, a programming language particularly applicable to biological systems.

“There’s been a lot of research in computer science on programming-language theory,” Phillips says, “and a lot of that can be applied to biological modeling.”

The stakes are large. The products of that modeling could provide insights into how biological systems work, and those insights could help in understanding and curing diseases."