History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences最新文献

Since the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP), biomedical sciences have moved away from a gene-centred view and towards a multi-factorial one in which environment, broadly speaking, plays a central role in the determination of human health and disease. Environmental exposures have been shown to be highly prevalent in disease causation. They are considered as complementary to genetic factors in the etiology of diseases, hence the introduction of the concept of the "exposome" as encompassing the totality of human environmental exposures, from conception onwards (Wild in Cancer Epidemiol Biomark Prev 14:1847-1850, 2005), and the launch of the Human Exposome Project (HEP) which aims to complement the HGP. At first sight, and seen as complementary to the genome, the exposome could thus appear as contributing to the rise of novel postgenomic deterministic narratives which place the environment at their core. Is this really the case? If so, what sort of determinism is at work in exposomics research? Is it a case of environmental determinism, and if so, in what sense? Or is it a new sort of deterministic view? In this paper, we first show that causal narratives in exposomics are still very similar to gene-centred deterministic narratives. They correspond to a form of Laplacian determinism and, above all, to what Claude Bernard called the "determinism of a phenomenon". Second, we introduce the notion of "reversed heuristic determinism" to characterize the specific deterministic narratives present in exposomics. Indeed, the accepted sorts of external environmental exposures conceived as being at the origins of diseases are determined, methodologically speaking, by their identifiable internal and biological markers. We conclude by highlighting the most relevant implications of the presence of this heuristic determinism in exposomics research.

In their anthology Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré argue that modern theories of biology imply that the fundamental structure of reality is processual at its core. In the present work, I first examine the implicit and explicit metaphysical presuppositions the editors make in order to allow for such an inference from scientific theory to ontology. After showing the difficulties of a naïve transfer of theoretical entities to fundamental ontology, I argue that the editors can nevertheless extend their claims beyond the mere articulation of different domain ontologies. This leads to the idea of a scientifically informed induction base for an ontology of processes.

This essay focuses on Mario Ageno (1915-1992), initially director of the physics laboratory of the Italian National Institute of Health and later professor of biophysics at Sapienza University of Rome. A physicist by training, Ageno became interested in explaining the special characteristics of living organisms origin of life by means of quantum mechanics after reading a book by Schrödinger, who argued that quantum mechanics was consistent with life but that new physical principles must be found. Ageno turned Schrödinger's view into a long-term research project. He aimed to translate Schrödinger's ideas into an experimental programme by building a physical model for at least a very simple living organism. The model should explain the transition from the non-living to the living. His research, however, did not lead to the expected results, and in the 1980s and the 1990s he focused on its epistemological aspect, thinking over the tension between the lawlike structure of physics and the historical nature of biology. His reflections led him to focus on the nature of the theory of evolution and its broader scientific meaning.

The aim of this paper is to elucidate the vital meaning and strategic role that nutrition holds in Claude Bernard’s “biological philosophy”, in the sense Auguste Comte gave to this expression, i.e. the theoretical part of biology. I propose that Bernard’s nutritive perspective on life should be thought of as an “interfield” object, following Holmes’ category. Not only does nutrition bridge disciplines like physiology and organic chemistry, as well as levels of inquiry ranging from special physiology to the organism’s total level, including the cell and protoplasm, but it also forms the genetic and structural foundation for Bernard’s two fundamental axioms in general physiology: the necessary complementarity of destruction and creation (1) and the uniformity of this physiological law across all life forms, be it plants or animals (2). Because Bernard’s nutritive theory is a major pivot for the re-ordering of life and its characterization, I argue that it must be located and understood in the scientific and metaphysical context of his time, of which he claims to be the heir and challenger—what I propose to characterize as the “epistemic space” of nutrition, on the background of which Bernard builds his own “logic”. I then set out this logic of nutrition, focusing on three interrelated bernardian theses: the establishment of the theory of indirect nutrition as the basis for the notion of “milieu intérieur”; the enduring conception of nutrition as a continuous generation; the emphasis on nutrition as a way of reshaping the form/matter relationship.

Abstract

This article reformulates Stephan Helmreich´s the ¨microbiomisation of race¨ as the historiality of otherness in the foundations of human microbiome science. Through the lens of my ethnographic fieldwork of a transnational community of microbiome scientists that conducted a landmark human microbiome research on indigenous microbes and its affiliated and first personalised microbiome initiative, the American Gut Project, I follow and trace the key actors, experimental systems and onto-epistemic claims in the emergence of human microbiome science a decade ago. In doing so, I show the links between the reinscription of race, comparative research on the microbial genetic variation of human populations and the remining of bioprospected data for personalised medicine. In these unpredictable research movements, the microbiome of non-Western peoples and territories is much more than a side project or a specific approach within the field: it constitutes the nucleus of its experimental system, opening towards subsequent and cumulative research processes and knowledge production in human microbiome science. The article demonstrates that while human microbiome science is articulated upon the microbial ‘makeup’ of non-wester(nised) communities, societies, and locales, its results and therapeutics are only applicable to medical conditions affecting rich nations (i.e., inflammatory, autoimmune, and metabolic diseases). My reformulation of ¨microbiomisation of race¨ as the condition of possibility of human microbiome science reveals that its individual dimension is sustained by microbial DNA data from human populations through bioprospecting practices and gains meaning through personalised medicine initiatives, informal online networks of pseudoscientific and commodified microbial-related evidence.