Whoah. This is way too cool.

Jim Rogers, Ph.D totally freaked me out yesterday with his presentation. Staggeringly cool. Abstract below. (Reading abstracts is boring, but trust me: this presentation was off da hook for programmer wanna-be bionerds. -grin-)

Is this exactly up my alley? Perhaps this will finally motivate me to learn C? :)

Emergent Information Processing in Biochemical Networks:
New Results and Challenges for Understanding Cells

As our understanding of biochemical pathway structures increases, it is clear that these pathways form networks of astonishing complexity. This creates an immediate challenge in trying to make sense of the enormous amount of data that studies of these systems generate. The field of bioinformatics has arisen in recent years to meet this challenge, and has been very successful in helping laboratory biochemists interpret their vast data, allowing them to understand the complex structures of the chemical networks they study. However, even when these chemical network structures are worked out, it is often times still not clear how these structures actually function or why they are so complex. This has led to the need for another level of quantitative analysis of biochemical systems. In this talk, results of such a study will be presented that show that some of these cellular networks have emergent information processing ability. In addition, there will be a general discussion of the future of biochemical analysis and the important role that computer scientists may have in the process of understanding basic cell biology and disease.

Ooo! You can read online here: Emergent decision-making in biological signal transduction networks