Systems Medicine (Chapman & Hall/CRC Computational Biology Series)

Accidentally bought 2, but was good to read with my girlfriend (who's in the medical field). Goes deep into topics, but explains them in a way that "makes sense." Has a bit of a mathematical lens to bio topics, which is good if you don't have that background!

Rather than fads of oversimplified "guidelines" of what is "good" or "bad" for your body, this explains the feedback loop mechanisms of physiology. These feedback loops have trade-offs, to where imbalance that is too much in one direction or another leads to different symptoms of disease. The book starts from first principles in order to teach how to understand and reason about physiology. For example, all cells come from other cells. Biological processes saturate, such that there is an upper limit to cells dividing/replicating to compensate for an imbalance of processes. Therefore, there are consequences when an upper limit is exceeded. Notice this doesn't yet point to a particular disease, it explains principles. The book then gives specific examples of prevalent health issues associated with what these principles explain.

looking at disease from a novel angle, simplifying the complex mechanism in biological systems while still able to capture the pattern of importance

This groundbreaking book builds on Uri Alon's famous Introduction to Systems Biology.Introduction to Systems Biology showed that complex networks WITHIN cells were:1. Made of simple repeating "motifs"2. Engineered for remarkable robustness3. Modular, allowing for very fast evolutionary selection and complexity growthIn Systems Medicine, Uri Alon expands this "systems engineering" approach OUTSIDE the cell to tackle tissues, organs and whole body (hormonal & immune) circuits.Systems Medicine demonstrates a new and organized way of understanding disease and medical intervention, building to a "Periodic Table of Diseases", echoing the periodic patterns observed by Mendeleev.Systems Medicine:1. Principles of biology: 3 Laws2. Why physiology is built this way3. How disease happens4. Strategies to treat disease (perturb system back into health/homeostasis)5. Periodic Table of Diseases

The book brings clarity to complex problems through insightful modeling of essential biological processes