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The old fashioned word for the sort of thing I care about is cybernetics. These days cybernetics refers almost exclusively to computers, but in the late 20^th century, it was to do with regarding biological systems in terms of the flow of information. How does an organism, or an organ, or even a cell, receive a whole bunch of inputs from the environment and alter its behaviour appropriately?

Ooh, that's really interesting. I had a friend who studied cybernetics at university, and I don't think he got taught that aspect of it either – it was all robots for him (and he turned out not to like it much anyway).

I wanted to ask some kind of a clarifying question along the lines of "does cybernetics concern itself more with the mechanism of how behaviour 'decisions' are made, or with the policy of what decisions should be made in what circumstances to best achieve the strategic objective?", but then I thought, probably that's a false dichotomy and precisely the interesting part of the discipline is where the two collide – where the strategically best decision policies are computationally or mechanistically infeasible given the limited resources, and conversely the decision policies which can be implemented easily are no good, so what's needed (whether by demanding it of a designer or by rewarding it evolutionarily) is to push the boundaries of both just a little.

It's especially interesting that your involvement with cancer arises from a more fundamental interest in that sort of thing. Do you know if there are any completely different career paths that the same underlying interest might just as plausibly have taken you into? (Or is that an unanswerable question?)