Oral Biofilm: Democracy or Aristocracy?

You've spent your career cutting into tissue and observing structure: bone architecture, vascular supply, nerve pathways. You think in anatomy. But anatomy is just network science that hasn't yet been formalized. Here's the shift: stop thinking about things and start thinking about connections between things. A node means nothing by itself. A bacterium floating in saliva is irrelevant. That same bacterium embedded in a biofilm — feeding three neighbors, receiving metabolites from two others, shielding an anaerobe from oxygen — is now a position in a network, and its importance is defined entirely by its connections.