Some links may be dead, for which my apologies, but please let me know if you run into them.
I was an early hire, back in 2003, in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. One of the first things I started was a series of chalk talks called Theory Lunch. The intention was to bring some of the culture of mathematics and physics to biology, although speakers were instructed that the word "theory" meant "conceptual problems in biology" rather than just "equations". The series caused some consternation at first, largely from experimental biologists who were unhappy with not being able to show their data in the usual slide-dump format. However, the expressiveness of body language when speaking and drawing and the give-and-take of questions and discussions eventually grew on people. Theory lunch remained the Department's de-facto seminar series until I left the Department in 2025. We acquired a sizeable audience, initially from around the Boston area and then, after the pandemic, a remote audience over zoom. The list of titles and abstracts over the years, including zoom recordings more recently, gives an electic view of how theory, in its many different guises, plays out in biology.
When the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School started, those of us who made up the initial faculty agreed that we needed to teach a course on systems biology. Four of us, Marc Kirschner, Lew Cantley, Walter Fontana and myself, assembled in Marc's office over the summer of 2004 and tried to figure out what this course should be. We never succeeded, nor did the Department ever agree about the meaning of "systems biology". However, we did give the first course on it, the undergraduate course MCB 195 in the spring of 2005, with each of us giving a series of lectures on what we thought was interesting. This initial course then morphed into the graduate course SB200, which was the foundational course taught to students in the Systems Biology graduate program. I co-taught it from its inception, first with Walter Fontana and Johan Paulsson, and then just with Johan, until 2016, when I begged for a leave of absence to write a book, which is still being written, and the course stopped. I gave shorter versions of the course at the University of Cambridge in 2011 and the University of Buenos Aires in 2018. Slides for these courses are available here.
If I was developing a new course on Systems Biology 2.0, all this previous material would become background and the concept of learning would be central. This development can already be seen in the UBA lectures.
One of the things which teaching prompted me to do was to try and understand the history of biology. It was the only way I could make sense of biology in the present. This timeline was an unfinished attempt to chart some of the early instances of a systems perspective in biology.
The Braess paradox — additonal resources can make performance worse — has stayed in my mind ever since I first encountered it. I wanted to incorporate this description of it into my lectures but I could never find a biological setting in which it might plausibly appear. Perhaps you might have better luck.