Noble, Denis

Professor Denis Noble was born in London on November 16th, 1936. He graduated from University College London in 1958. Already as a PhD student, supervised by Professor O. Hutter, he published two milestone papers on physiological properties of rythmic activity of caridac muscle in Nature, 1960. He continued publishing outstanding contributions on this topic in other high visibility journals (Science, Nature, PNAS, Journal of Physiology and others). In total he published over 350 scientific papers addressing problems in physiology and systems biology. These works are highly cited. According to the data base ISI Web of Knowledge over 8000 times. Between the years 1984 and 2004 he held the Chair of Cardiac Physiology, University of Oxford, Great Britain, where he is now Professor Emeritus and co-Director of Computational Physiology. 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 research demonstrated that there is not only one pacemaking mechanism in the heart, but there are more oscillators and that oscillators are coupled by feedback loops involving different ionic channels in membranes of cardiomyocytes and in cells of the conducting system.
Denis Noble is one of the pioneers of Systems Biology and developed the first viable mathematical model of the working heart in 1960. He is an author or editor of ten internationally recognised books, the last one among them The Music of Life, recently translated into Slovenian: „Glasba življenja“, highlights philosophycal aspects of physiological issues; challenges the foundations of current biological sciences, questions the central dogma, its unidirectional view of information flow, and its imposition of a bottom-up methodology for research in the life sciences. Of interest are the quantitations showing that knowing the interactions between proteins and their coding genes is insufficient to explain the complexity of most physiological processes and that the complexity of these systems requires special, systems biology, approaches.
Denis Noble is a Fellow of The Royal Society in London, in 1979 he was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire and received a number of other distinguished awards. His major invited lectures include the Darwin Lecture for the British Association in 1966, the Nahum Lecture at Yale in 1977 and the Ueda lecture at Tokyo University in 1985 and 1990. He was President of the Medical Section of the British Association 1991-92.
He was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1988 and an Honorary Fellow in 1994, an Honorary Member of the American Physiological Society in 1996 and of the Japanese Physiological Society in 1998. In 1999 he was awarded a CBE. He has honorary doctorates from Sheffield University (2004), the Université de Bordeaux (2005) and the University of Warwick (2008).
As Secretary-General of the International Union of Physiological Sciences (IUPS) 1993-2001, he played a major role in launching the Physiome Project, an international project to use computer simulations to create the quantitative physiological models necessary to interpret the genome, and he was elected President of the IUPS at its world congress in Kyoto in 2009. Since January 2011 is the chief editor of Interface Focus, published by the Royal Society, London. He is an Honorary Foreign Member of the Académie Royale de Médecine de Belgique (1993), and received the Pavlov Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2004). He plays classical guitar and sings Occitan troubadour and folk songs. In addition to English, he has lectured in French, Italian, Occitan, Japanese and Korean.
He visited Slovenia in past, but started to collaborate more actively in the last years, also in connection to the preparation of the Slovenian translation of the book The Music of Life, which is currently being translated as well into Japanese and Chinese. In October 2010 he held a lecture at Slovenian Academy of Sciences about the questions of Systems Biology and held in Ljubljana Plenary Lecture at the Meeting on Biological Sciences and Society – Organisms as Living Systems. Since 2011 Denis Noble is associate member of SASA.

Noble D. (1962). A modification of the Hodgkin-Huxley equations applicable to Purkinje fibre action and pacemaker potentials. Journal of Physiology 160, 317-352.
Hauswirth O, Noble D & Tsien RW. (1968). Adrenaline: mechanism of action on the pacemaker potential in cardiac Purkinje fibres. Science 162, 916-917.
Noble D & Tsien RW. (1969). Outward membrane currents activated in the plateau range of potentials in cardiac Purkinje fibres. Journal of Physiology 200, 205-231.
Cohen I, Giles WR & Noble D. (1976). A cellular basis for the T wave of the electrocardiogram. Nature 262, 657-661.
Hilgemann DW & Noble D. (1987). Excitation-contraction coupling and extracellular calcium transients in rabbit atrium: Reconstruction of basic cellular mechanisms. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 230, 163-205.
DiFrancesco D & Noble D. (1985). A model of cardiac electrical activity incorporating ionic pumps and concentration changes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 307, 353-398.
Noble D. (2002). Modelling the heart: from genes to cells to the whole organ. Science 295, 1678-1682.
Noble D. (2006). The Music of Life. OUP, Oxford.
Noble D. (2011). Differential and integral views of genetics in computational systems biology. Journal of the Royal Society Interface Focus 1, 7-15.
Noble D, Auffray C, Chen Z & Werner E, ed. (2012). The selected papers of Professor Denis Noble CBE FRS. A Journey in Physiology toward Enlightenment. Imperial College Press, London.

(September 2011)