Figure 1. Metabolic fluxes are the best representation of the phenotype of an organism.

Health or disease cannot be viewed as the result of the fulfillment of a linear program, but as the result of an open process in which a specific biological state or phenotype springs from certain genetic information interacting with other information existing at that moment. This vision helps to understand how multiple phenotypes can be formed from a single genome, and how environment and chance select, at each moment, one from among all possible phenotypes.