Summary

Overall the conference showed that systems biology is not only off to a good start but beginning to take off from the runway into a promising and exiting future. The movement from wet lab to in silico experiments, may not only speed up research and reduce the enormous budgets pharmaceutical companies spend on drug development, they may redefine the very foundations of biology. No longer can a biologist ignore computer science and mathematics. They are becoming an essential component of the field. At the same time the student may benefit if software provides a release from the endless hours, months and years of lab work now required to do wet lab experiments. Indeed, the integration of computer science and biology may change our world as much as the computer changed our world in the last century.