Dynamic model for failures in biological systems

Abstract

A dynamic model for failures in biological organisms is proposed and studied both analytically and numerically. Each cell in the organism becomes dead under sufficiently strong stress, and is then allowed to be healed with some probability. It is found that unlike the case of no healing, the organism in general does not completely break down even in the presence of noise. Revealed is the characteristic time evolution that the system tends to resist the stress longer than the system without healing, followed by sudden breakdown with some fraction of cells surviving. When the noise is weak, the critical stress beyond which the system breaks down increases rapidly as the healing parameter is raised from zero, indicative of the importance of healing in biological systems.Comment: To appear in Europhys. Let