Throughout the twentieth century, life science research was guided by the reductionist paradigm. The success of omics technologies, which was the most recent and disruptive approach, has led to touch the enormous molecular complexity of living beings, which necessarily requires applying a new systemic approach, in order to finally understand the laws that guide complex biological processes and thus finally giving the concrete possibility of curing the many multifactorial diseases, today still lacking in decisive therapeutic aids.

Lilia Alberghina in her book “To understand biological complexity”, Licosia 2021, presents this new, important scientific development, to which she herself has made seminal contributions in several areas. The author stresses that in order to fully grasp the fruits of this scientific revolution, innovations in the organization of science must be made to facilitate multidisciplinary collaboration, while current organizations (universities and research institutions) are based on monodisciplinarity.

The close integration between life sciences and computational ones, from mathematical models to machine learning, will make it possible to understand and intervene on a large number of problems, supporting a desirable growth in economic competitiveness that would otherwise not be achievable.

The book is in Italian.