Network Medicine
In 2012, Barabási was invited to speak at TEDMED about network medicine, an emerging subfield at the interface of medicine and network science. He asked Mauro Martino, the first full-time designer in the BarabásiLab, to help develop a visual narrative for the talk. Martino produced videos to show the human interactome, a network of 13,000 human proteins con- nected by 141,000 protein interactions. But visualizing such an exceptional number of nodes and links was not possible in a single map. The videos display only a small fraction of all links at any time, their occasional flickerings merely hinting at the many, largely invisible links.
By highlighting the genes involved in asthma, indicated by the purple cluster, and COPD, shown in yellow, this video illustrates how the proteins linked to the same disease cluster in the same vicinity of the network. This video traces the slightly different perspectives of the asthma disease module within the interactome. Each patient has her own unique manifestation of the disease, but the molecular changes that cause the disease are all limited to the same asthma module. And all patients have the same painful experience—they can’t breathe. It reminds us that breath itself is stuck in the web of the disease.
BARABÁSILAB: HIDDEN PATTERNS
