All biological systems are deeply interconnected. Cell-to-cell interactions form tissues and organs, links between organs (digestive, neural, endocrine, immune, etc.) help create individuals, and groups of individuals shape and are reshaped in turn by human cultures and other organisms.

Systems biology can be considered an offspring of systems science, a multidisciplinary field that studies the interactions of complex systems in nature, human societies, and science itself. The field aims at studying complexity in all its forms and in developing translational models applicable to countless subfields in biology, engineering, medicine, and the social and cultural sciences.

The Systems Biology Group, Inc., is currently integrating work in cultural neurobiology, immunology, endocrinology, and many related fields. It is looking especially at present at fields that provide novel insights into the behavioral control of biological aging processes.

Chronological aging simply refers to the number of years a person has lived, and in all normal senses of the term ‘aging’ is unavoidable. Biological aging, on the other hand, as viewed in most current models, refers to the cumulative biological damage to an organism due to a lifelong series of environmental insults, many of which may be avoidable or repairable if caught at an early stage of development.

Aging can therefore be distinguished into chronological and biological components, the second of which recent studies suggest can be delayed by behavioral interventions or in some cases reversed.

The perspective of the Systems Biology Group is that novel insights involving the control of aging and associated diseases emerge when we approach such issues from the broad perspectives of systems biology rather than from the “siloed” approaches still common in most biological and medical fields.