Cybernetics, Systems Biology, and the Phenomenological Gap [Historical Perspectives]

This article examines the impact of the cybernetics movement of the 1950s and 1960s on contemporary research in biology, with a particular focus on interrogating why the cybernetic approach seems to have largely fallen out of the mainstream discourse of systems and synthetic biology. When I entered graduate school in 2014 with the goal of studying biological control systems, something I quickly noticed was that many of the most prominent people in the field seemed to have an incredible admiration for the ideas that grew out of Norbert Wiener's cybernetics movement. Not knowing any of the history, the term
cybernetics
sounded more like something out of an early Isaac Asimov novel than a genuine research discipline. Though there was this clear admiration of cybernetics, Wiener's work, for the most part, was not directly incorporated in our curriculum or textbooks in the way that the works of Bode, Shannon, and Nyquist were, aside from a few highly technical topics like Wiener filters and Wiener processes. What I took from this is that it must have been an interesting idea but not something that was a central part of the rest of the theoretical framework for analyzing feedback systems that made up my first years in the control systems graduate program.