How this story did start...

The origin for this book is the workshop ``Dynamical Modeling in Biotechnology'' that was held in Villa Gualino, Torino (Italy) during the last week of may and the first of june, 1996. This Interdiscoplinary Advanced Workshop was sponsored by the European Commission DGXII of the European Union. The goal of the workshop was to show some application of the theory of dynamical systems and statistical mechanics to biotechnological topics to young researchers (master and doctorate students) coming from biological, physical and mathematical studies. The central idea is that the tools used in the investigation of chaotic dynamics, out of equilibrium statistical mechanics and disordered system are becaming a mature field in theoretical physics and computer science. The basic ingredients of these studies consist of a strong abstraction of a ``real'' system, leading to a model made of several interacting elements which are very simple but whose global behavior can be very complex. We (the phisicists) start to understand some aspects of this behavior, and we would like to apply these ideas to those systems made of several pieces with a really complex behavior, i.e. to living systems.

The power of modelization in physics and in engineering is out of doubt, while in the biotechnological field many theoretical studies stop at the description level. However, the results of abstract modeling (the one to which we physicists are naturally lead) is still quite far from the reality of biological systems. We think that it is time for theorical modelization to enter the field of biotecnology, and for that we need people with both physical and biological knowledge.

We structured the workshop into morning lessons and afternoon projects at the computer, in order to allow the immediate implementation of the ideas. This organization was possible thank to ISI (Institute for Scientific Interchange) that fournished the computers, and to Villa Gualino, an hotel belonging to the Regione Piemonte, that hosts also ISI. Two lecture rooms and six working rooms with computer facilities were available. In this way we lived together two intense weeks sleeping, eating, teaching and learning in the same structure (after this period we were all exhausted). The scheduling of the workshop can be found at the end of this preface.

The first three days of the workshop were devoted to ``computer alfabetization'' in C and FORTRAN (we also covered the use of graphycs routines and the use of networked DNA databases) and to introductory lectures in theoretical biology. This period also let people know the contents of the projects, in order to divide them into groups. We originally planned to have ten-days projects, in order to cover advanced topics, but the students asked to partecipate to more than one project, so some of them were halved and duplicated in the second week.

The home page which was established at the Internet site of ISI;  is now serving as a reference for students and lecturers for exchanging materials and information. One can find the list the lectures, projects and seminars in the Appendix 1, and the reversed list of lecturers and tutors in the Appendix 2.

A total of 31 students participated to the workshop from different European countries. Some extra students, without EU nationality, were admitted as observers. Among them, 13 students were from biological or medical disciplines, the rest mostly from physics or from mathematics, engineering and computer science. A list of the students is included in the Appendix 3.

As a conclusion of this part, we can add some sparse comments.

The workshop has been generally successful. It can set a scheme for future courses on these subjects to be held at the doctoral or post-doctoral level. Many improvements are possible, some of them are mentioned in the following, which are likely to considerably improve the efficiency.

• Too much time was devoted to lectures, perhaps reduce by one the number of lecture courses. We do not think it is a good idea to reduce the time devoted to each lecture course: six hours time to develop some ideas and methods is strictly necessary.
• In general a good opinion on the quality of the tutors is reported by the students in their written reports. We think the idea of the projects, prepared and followed by the tutors was a real success.
• Some of the students criticise the choice of directly performing computer experiments. These are mainly the students (mostly in engineering and biology) who have been trained to the ``use'' of pre-made software packages. All these students ask for more time to ``discuss'' the problems and have the tendency to think that less time is required for performing the proposed task, once it is correctly-settled. Although I agree on this latter request of more discussion, we tend to be very negative towards the ``use'' of pre-made software packages. We really think it is useful to perform all the steps from the basic idea to its achievement, to think of a problem together with its feasibility on the computer. To write programs one should use the most common of the high level computer languages (i.e. Fortran or C).
• The judgement on computer facilities at ISI depends a lot on the cultural background of the student (biologists prefer good graphics performances, which can be quite expensive) and on the existing facilities at their home institution. There is a lack of homogeneity in computer facilities in Europe.
• Lectures were given by physicists, that was intentional. So, the emphasis shifted from ``start from the biological problem'' to ``start from the models''. Some of the students did not like this shift, mainly biology students. Lecture courses whose emphasis is more on the biological problem are certainly needed and should be organised, but then we should not ask to physicists to lecture. Our personal experience is that it is quite difficult to combine the two points of view, but perhaps not impossible! It would be really very challenging to have a ``true'' joint meeting of the modelling with the experimental biology community.
• Most of the students did not like the idea of having evening seminars. At evenings, they prefer parties at the bar. We cannot blame them, the problem was that the bar closed at 10 p.m.
• Advertising the workshop on Nature was useless. Only one of the students got the information reading this journal, most of them knew of the workshop by e-mail or reading the home page on the Internet site at ISI.