Jeremy Gunawardena

In biology, by contrast, theory and experiment seem to be more entwined and are usually practiced by the same scientists.

And yet, in a provocatively titled twenty fourteen article, Biology is More Theoretical than Physics, systems biologist Jeremy Gunawardena challenged this view about the relationship between biological theories and experiments.

He made a case for a number of biological entities that were postulated, imagined to exist theoretically long before they were discovered experimentally in a division of labor similar to that described by Feynman for physics.

These theorized entities include such fundamental concepts as genes, receptors, enzymes, ion channels, and tumor suppressors.