Biology across Scales:Historical Perspective on Some Indian Contributions

Understanding Biological systems across scales, has led to two apparently contradicting approaches the reductive approach, and the holistic approach. The former attempts to understand complex systems by reducing it into smaller components, whereas the latter attempts to combine information to integrate at the systems level. Many important contributions from India have been made in these areas. I attempt to present a view of these in this article to mark celebrations 30 years of the Department of Biotechnology.