'“Quite soon, as we move from genes to the proteins that they code for, and then on to the interactions between these proteins, the problems become seriously complicated.”

Denis Noble is Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology at Oxford University where he held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology from 1984 to 2004. Noble was one of the pioneers of Systems Biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960 with his supervisor Otto Hutter. The work was later developed with Dario DiFrancesco and others to become the canonical models on which more than 100 cardiac cell models are based today.

Noble has published over 350 articles in academic journals, including Nature, Science, PNA and the Journal of Physiology. His books include the first popular science book on the subject, The Music of Life, which has been translated into 12 languages. He was also elected President of the International Union of Physiological Sciences at its Congress in Kyoto in 2009.