Denis Noble put the heartbeat on a computer, then took on the gene
In 1960, while still a doctoral student in London, Denis Noble published the first mathematical simulation of the heart's electrical rhythm built on real experimental data. Decades later his team used supercomputers to create the first virtual organ, a simulated heart. Then he turned on the central ideas of modern biology, arguing that genes do not call all the shots.
Noble began studying how the heart beats in 1958 at University College London, earning his doctorate under Otto Hutter in 1961. The pair had identified two potassium currents in the heart's specialised conducting fibres, and Noble adapted the equations Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley had written for nerve impulses so they could reproduce the long, drawn-out cardiac signal and the heart's built-in pacemaker rhythm. His 1962 model is regarded as the first to tackle that extended plateau this way.
He kept refining the approach, adding more measured currents in a 1975 collaboration with Richard Tsien and, a decade later alongside Dario DiFrancesco, producing the first heart-cell model to track shifting ion concentrations, including calcium stored and released inside the cell. The Royal Society later picked that 1985 paper for a celebration of 350 years of its journal. Noble joined Balliol College, Oxford, in 1963 and held Oxford's chair of cardiovascular physiology from 1984 to 2004. The virtual heart linked models of single channels and cells to whole-organ anatomy, offering a way to explore irregular rhythms, drug effects and defibrillators. He also helped launch the Physiome Project, an international effort to model the body across every scale.
Alongside the science, Noble writes as a philosopher of biology. In The Music of Life, published in 2006, he attacked genetic determinism, pointing to feedback loops and causes that run downwards from whole systems to molecules, and argued no level of explanation deserves priority.
In 2014 he co-founded the Third Way of Evolution with James Shapiro, which rejects natural selection as the main engine of evolution and predicts the modern synthesis will be replaced. Mainstream evolutionary biologists have not accepted those claims, and critics call it a fringe movement.
Source: Denis Noble
