Biology is riddled with competition. Cells in communities often compete for resources, pathogens compete against host immune systems, and on a larger scale, organisms compete against each other for limited resources in their environment. The 15th EMBL PhD Symposium, entitled 'Competition in Biology - The Race for Survival from Molecules to Systems', addresses this. The Symposium is an annual event, organised by first-year PhD students at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany. It brings together fellow students from around the world, for a 3-day series of talks by leading experts but also by students themselves. Biological competition offers an exciting and fresh perspective on the life sciences. The 2013 Symposium is timely in contextualising biological competition as a fundamental concept from the biomolecular to the systems level.