To control a genetic regulatory network, you have to find its lever points, says Ilya Shmulevich. The engineering terminology isn't surprising: Shmulevich, now an associate professor at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle, finished three degrees in electrical engineering, a postdoc in computer music recognition, and a stint at a Finnish signal-processing institute before he made the leap into biology.
"I was looking for important applications of my work," says Shmulevich. "Many of the same tools that I was using and the same kinds of methods that I was developing in machine learning or filter design were applicable to the problems in microarray data analysis or genetic network modeling."
Today, he uses his own novel computational models to map genetic networks, classify cancers, understand immune responses, and perhaps even to resolve fundamental differences between living and nonliving things. "Ilya keeps coming up with these wonderfully wacky ways of ...
