Whether it is acting, race car driving, or exploring the moon, it is usually the actors, drivers or astronauts who make the covers of magazines and receive celebrity accolades. And most of them certainly deserve praise for their hard work and the perfect execution of the task at hand. But we all know that their rise to stardom happened on the shoulders of uncounted others whose names flash by in very small font at the end of a movie or are not even mentioned. If we consider car racing, for example, a huge number of individuals contributed to the creation of the infrastructure for the complex system within which an Indy 500 victory is possible. Engineers not only designed and built the cars, but also thought up and actually realized the idea of tough yet light helmets, fire-resistant suits, pits custom-made for speed, the race track itself, and the entire support system allowing drivers to race, spectators to cheer, and venders to sell their wares. And so it happens in many situations that the thinkers and tinkerers and organizers, the makers and builders behind the scenes, remain in the shadows and out of the public eye, even though it is they who make miracles possible. To some degree this is not surprising, as engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and ingenious nerds of various types are not notorious for their interest in social hobnobbing or braggadocio. The situation in systems biology is not all that different. Here, it is experimental biologists or clinicians, founders of biotech start-up companies, or producers of novel medicines, who may receive at least a bit of attention from the public, and whose success rests firmly on the shoulders of uncounted, unsung heroes from the field of engineering.

The most dramatic example is arguably the paradigm of experimental systems biology itself, the –omics revolution, where widely noticed insights into the inner workings of genomes, micro-RNAs or protein interactions have only been possible due to ingenious engineering that led to miniaturization and permitted the high-throughput execution of many parallel experiments with robots. Unluckily for their image in the public eye, these robots are nothing like Star Wars’ R2-D2; they don't smile, they don't look sad when scolded, and they do not shake hands.