Systems biology is supposed to revolutionise the biology by going beyond reductionism of molecular biology which has dominated biology for decades. The reductionist approach mostly relie on breaking a larger biological system down into pieces, analysing smaller pieces seperately and further determining the connections between them. For nearly 30 years (1970s to the early 1990s) this kind of approach was quite popular and successful in the biology. For a long time a particular type of reductionism – methodological reductionism – has been particularly evident in biology with a mojor focus to understand the physiochemical basis of biological phenomenon. Unfortunately reductionism has its own problems, one of the major concern is the lack of complexity or ability to capture the system level behviour. One of the excerpt from Margaret Drabble’s book The Sea Lady portrayes the harsh realities of reductionism,

You can’t learn everything from the laboratory, that’s what he used to say. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, he told us. The whole behaves differently from the parts, and has different properties. That’s what he taught us, and he was right. It’s out of fashion to say these days, when we spend our time scrutinizing the interactions of eukaryotic microbes, but it’s true, nevertheless. It’s still true.