Andrea Califano
Founding Chair of the Department of Systems Biology, Columbia University
I’m the Chair of the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University and the Director of the Columbia Genome Center. My passion is creating an assembly manual – a user manual – of the human cell so that instead of having to look for things by testing them one at a time, when something is broken or doesn’t work in the human cell, we can figure out how to go and look for it.
EXPs by Andrea Califano
The entire mechanistic construction of a cell is like a computer, processing billions of pieces of information and trying to make decisions based on them.
Cancer biology has really revolutionised the way we think about the cell as a complex mechanism because it was the first discipline in which a very large amount of data was collected from many different patients.
It turns out that cancer derives from so many different potential patterns of gene mutations and also from signals from the environment.