Description
Book SynopsisPhilosophy 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 These previously unpublished contributions shed new light on these traditional topics by integrating them with problems, methods, and results from three prominent areas of contemporary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, tran
Trade Review
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
Table of ContentsIntroduction
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
