At the turn of the millennium, systems biology emerged as a new trend in the life sciences claiming to revolutionise biology and medicine. While the Human Genome Project and subsequent reductionist -omics approaches produced masses of data on the key molecules in living cells, systems biology shifts towards a more holistic mind-set, focussing on interactions to discover life’s universal principles and laws. This new way of creating biological knowledge through the making of mathematical models of life, ultimately aims to advance personalized medicine. By conceptualizing systems biology as a Scientific/Intellectual Movement (Frickel & Gross, 2005), and analysing the entanglement of epistemic and social transformations, this paper discusses how a group of researchers from different disciplines and countries has moved the modeling of life from the periphery towards the centre of biology. More specifically, I will detail three interrelated spatial movements: aggregation, circulation and oscillation. I will show how some strong, dispersed local centers, have been able to effectively raise funds to build human capacity, organisations and infrastructures, and create international networks. Through interaction with science policy makers, a global circulation of policies for systems biology took place, producing a rise of creative activity around systems biology. However, ‘what comes up must go down’, and as science policy and funding are now moving to the next frontier, the future of systems biology is hanging in the balance.