Denis Noble is a British physiologist and biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford until 2004 and was appointed Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Noble is one of the pioneers of systems biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. He established The Third Way of Evolution (TWE) project with James A. Shapiro, which predicts that the entire framework of the modern synthesis will be replaced. His research focuses on using computer models of biological organs and organ systems to interpret function from the molecular level to the whole organism. Together with international collaborators, his team has used supercomputers to create the first virtual organ, the virtual heart.
His books—The Music of Life, Dance to the Tune of Life and Understanding Living Systems—challenge the foundations of current biological sciences, question the central dogma, its unidirectional view of information flow, and its imposition of a bottom-up methodology for research in the life sciences.
