Harvard Medical School made a significant commitment to a the new field of emerging systems biology when, less than a year ago, they created a new department level program called the Department of Systems Biology.  Harvard announced this new department at a medical conference entitled "Mathematics Models in Signaling Systems" held at Vanderbuilt University.  This is the same methodology that has been used by the National CFIDS Foundation (NCF) for many years in our effort to unravel the complexities of CFIDS/ME, to find the cause of the disease and to find a therapy that will stop or reverse the damage done by the mechanisms.

     At Harvard, the new department consists of recruited faculty from areas such as mathematics, computer sciences, physics and engineering as well as those from more traditional biomedical fields.  Attacking the problem of CFIDS/ME from the perspective of an engineering point of view has been ongoing at the NCF for many years and it has led to some highly significant discoveries.  While there were some who were critical of our choice of a medical director whose background was in engineering and, specifically, signaling, it has been proven that attacking a problem from a different prospective has advanced our knowledge immeasurably.

     Harvard is not the first to incorporate a new department to harness talent from broad disciplines.  Another example of this emerging field is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computational and Systems Biology Initiative.  Systems biology is a relatively new research approach yielding significant clues to one of the most challenging problems of disease and the National CFIDS Foundation is proud that they are the first patient group in the world to have applied this methodology to the complications found in CFIDS/ME and to fund research that has proved significant using this method.