This summer, I went to the q-Bio Conference on Cellular Information Processing. You can see the website here: http://cnls.lanl.gov/q-bio/ It was a really interesting international meeting of so-called “quantitative biologists”—people who study biology in a way that uses numbers and equations.

This is something that I’m really interested in, because it seems like a very natural way to study biology. There are numbers everywhere in biology, after all, from concentrations of a protein inside a cell to forces tugging on a cell membrane. And ultimately, everything in biology works according physical laws, which we can express mathematically.

There’s a pretty good Wikipedia article about “Systems Biology,” which is similar to “quantitative biology.” There are also closely-related things called “computational biology,” “computational systems biology,” “mathematical biology,” or “biomathematics.” Sometimes I wish they would stop coming up with new words and just call it biology!!!!