Lecture summary

Systems Biology and the Spirit of Tustin

Arnold Tustin is chiefly known for his contributions to control theory and its application to electrical machines. However, his interests were much wider than engineering, for he was a polymath who brought a systems approach to each of the many areas that he touched.

In the modern jargon he thought ‘outside the box’ and in doing so championed the use of control systems theory beyond its traditional limits, applying a systems approach to such areas as economics and biology. It is the use of a systems approach and his interest in biology that connects him to the theme of this lecture.

Erwin Schrödinger was the first to suggest a systems approach to biology -- writing in 1943, he observed that the clue to the understanding of life is that it is based on a pure mechanism. In the subsequent decades a number of important scientists contributed to a gradual development of a systems view of biology. In recent years urgency has been added to the issue by growing concerns for the future of health-care systems and our apparent inability to provide cures for important diseases. The result has been the appearance of a new multi-disciplinary area – systems biology.

In fact, systems biology is more than merely a new area of research. It marks an historic change of focus from the systematic and mathematical analysis of physical systems to the corresponding analysis of living systems. The great complexity of living systems means that this realignment of research will depend crucially upon the tools of control, feedback theory and dynamical systems analysis. It is thus of inestimable importance that today's generation of control systems engineers recognise this development and respond, in the spirit of Tustin, to the challenges that it presents.

This lecture will use Tustin's idea of a systems approach as a vehicle with which to suggest structure for this process. Specifically, we will describe the background and outline the opportunities for control and systems analysis in biology and physiology. We will then look forward to see how feedback control ideas, originally developed for the analysis and design of physical systems, might be extended to help our search for the mechanisms that govern living systems.

Biography 

Peter Wellstead was born in 1944 in St Albans, Hertfordshire, where his father was a farm worker. At the age of 16 he was apprenticed to the Marconi Instruments Company where a generous apprentice scheme and County Scholarships enabled him to study part-time and eventually obtain a degree in Electrical Engineering from Hatfield College of Technology (later Hertfordshire University).

After postgraduate study at Warwick University, he worked at CERN, Geneva, before joining the Control Systems Centre at UMIST (University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology). He stayed thirty years at Manchester, teaching and researching the modelling, identification and control of dynamical systems while also collaborating extensively with industry. In 2003 he moved to Ireland, where he is currently the Science Foundation Ireland Research Professor of Systems Biology at the Hamilton Institute, National University of Ireland Maynooth, in County Kildare.