1st Edition

Philosophy of Molecular Medicine Foundational Issues in Research and Practice

Edited By Giovanni Boniolo, Marco J. Nathan Copyright 2017
    296 Pages
    by Routledge

    296 Pages
    by Routledge

    Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Theory and Practice aims at a systematic investigation of a number of foundational issues in the field of molecular medicine. The volume is organized around four broad modules focusing, respectively, on the following key aspects: What are the nature, scope, and limits of molecular medicine? How does it provide explanations? How does it represent and model phenomena of interest? How does it infer new knowledge from data and experiments? The essays collected here, authored by prominent scientists and philosophers of science, focus on a handful of mainstream topics in the philosophical literature, such as causation, explanation, modeling, and scientific inference. These previously unpublished contributions shed new light on these traditional topics by integrating them with problems, methods, and results from three prominent areas of contemporary biomedical science: basic research, translational and clinical research, and clinical practice.

    Introduction



    Giovanni Boniolo and Marco J. Nathan





     



    Part 1: Nature, Origins, and Scope





    Chap. 1: Molecular medicine: the clinical method enters the lab. What tumor heterogeneity and primary tumor culture teach us



    Giovanni Boniolo





    Chap. 2: Personalized Medicine: Historical Roots of a Medical Model



    Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio and Francesco Spöring





    Chap. 3: From the concept of genetic disease to the geneticization of diseases: analyzing and solving the paradox of contemporary medical genetics



    Marie Darrason





     



    Part 2: Explanation





    Chap. 4: Molecular complexity: Why has psychiatry not been revolutionized by genomics (yet)?



    Maël Lemoine





    Chap. 5: How cancer spreads: reconceptualizing a disease



    Katherine E. Liu, Alan C. Love, and Michael Travisano





    Chap. 6: Evolutionary Perspectives on Molecular Medicine: Cancer from an Evolutionary Perspective



    Anya Plutynski





     



    Part 3: Representation and Modeling





    Chap. 7: Towards a Notion of Intervention in Big-Data Biology and Molecular Medicine



    Federico Boem and Emanuele Ratti





    Chap. 8: Pathways to the clinic: cancer stem cells and challenges for translational research



    Melinda Bonnie Fagan





    Chap. 9: Counterfactual Reasoning in Molecular Medicine



    Marco J. Nathan





     



    Part 4: Inference





    Chap. 10: Forms of Extrapolation in Molecular Medicine



    Pierre-Luc Germain and Tudor Baetu





    Chap. 11: Testing Oncological Treatments in the Era of Personalized Medicine



    David Teira





    Chap. 12: Opportunities and challenges of molecular epidemiology



    Federica Russo and Paolo Vineis



    Biography

    Giovanni Boniolo (degrees in Physics and in Philosophy) is Professor of Philosophy of Science and Medical Humanities at the Università di Ferrara, and Anna Boyksen Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Technische Universität München. He has published 13 books (plus 12 books edited) and about 200 research articles.





    Marco J. Nathan is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. His work has been published in various philosophical and scientific venues, including Noûs, Philosophy of Science, British Journal for Philosophy of Science, Nephrology Dialysis and Transplantation, Biology and Philosophy, and Synthese.

    Philosophy of Molecular Medicine offers 12 insightful chapters of philosophical and historical reflections on foundational issues in molecular medicine. This edited volume offers a rich introduction to and discussion of important philosophical issues that arise at the interface of basic science, clinical research, and clinical practice.
    -Sara Green, Springer