I just watched a video about simplicity and complexity, which is lectured by Prof. George Whitesides. The video is available on TED, named "Toward a science of simplicity". Anyone interested in this topic is highly recommended to take a look at it.

Simplicity is difficult to define, but professor quoted the words "I know it when I see it" and use cups, glassed and tea pots to explain what is simplicity. Also, Prof. George Whitesides said the academics like complexity and emergency that currently greatly developed while simplicity is almost non-existent though much more required in our reality world. He then explained complexity and emergency. Complex systems are composed of components that interact with one another dissipatively and unexpectedly. Two instances of traffic system and metabolism in cells were given to explain the weird things would happen in complex systems we don’t know why, which referred to emergency phenomena.

However, there is a way to connect simplicity to complexity that he called stacking. Two very familiar examples for us are the internet started with binary arithmetic and integrated circuits assembled from simple transistors. Then he provide that simple things should be reliable, predictable, cheap, with high performance and stackable that serve for building blocks to get complex world. In this case, the simplicity could be easily extended to create complexity.

This talk inspired me about the current research on biological science. The complexity of biological systems are more and more clearly recognized by biologist through the past discoveries, and there are far more scientists not only from life sciences but also those from physics and chemistry are getting involved into the decoding of complexity of biosystems, however from the point of views in this talk, whenever the biological area is going to get industrialized, people in this area are required to provide simple components or elements that are reliable, predictable, cheap but with high performance and also stackable, which are almost universally necessary for engineering. Groups of people are carrying out similar works. What is the simple elements for biological systems? It’s macromolecules like DNA and proteins. Nowadays, people could easily manipulate DNA molecules by chemical synthesis or PCR, nevertheless, rational designing protein is still an obstacle. Many labs are dedicating to develop a series of tools to help designing functional protein with such properties mentioned above. Work from one of them are particularly promising as I can see. Their research work is engaged in de novo design of protein with function. For now, the tools are still under construction and principles are still in test. However, I am expecting they could make a breakthrough in recent future.