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The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences Advance Access published online on February 17, 2009
The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences, doi:10.1093/gerona/gln066
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

This article appears in the following The Journals of Gerontology Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences issue: Special Issue: Biology of Aging SummitPerspective [View the issue table of contents]

Toward a Systems Biology Framework for Understanding Aging and Health Span

Geoffrey B. West1 and Aviv Bergman2

1 Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico
2 Department of Systems and Computational Biology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York

Address correspondence to Geoffrey B. West, PhD, Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87505. Email: gbw{at}santafe.edu


  Abstract

It is argued that aging research is at a stage where it could benefit greatly from a more intense engagement with the perspectives emphasized by systems biology and complexity science. A more integrated, systematic approach is needed if we are ever to have a fully developed, fundamental understanding of aging, longevity, and their relationship to health. A broader, deeper, more quantitative, and predictive conceptual framework can lead to theoretical approaches and realistic models that can be quantitatively confronted with data and, perhaps more importantly, stimulate novel questions and novel experiments. Integral to this is the search for underlying causal multilevel mechanisms and principles that can be quantified and developed into a serious predictive theoretical framework, providing a point of departure for framing a more integrated research agenda.

Keywords Biology; Aging; Health span

Received: December 9, 2008; Accepted: December 10, 2008

Decision Editor: Huber R. Warner, PhD


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