Contextualizing Systems Biology

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Understanding Systems Biology: A Place for Social Science Analysis

   • Regine Kollek, Imme Petersen, Anne Brüninghaus, Martin Döring

   Pages 1-26

3. Basic Concepts of Systems Biology as Seen Through Systems Biologists’ Eyes: Metaphorical Imagination and Epistemic Presuppositions

   • Martin Döring, Regine Kollek, Anne Brüninghaus, Imme Petersen

   Pages 27-118

4. Systems-Oriented Approaches in Biology: System Biologist’s Narratives of Present, Past, and Future

   • Martin Döring, Anne Brüninghaus, Regine Kollek, Imme Petersen

   Pages 119-146

5. Systems Biology, Information Technology, and Cancer Research

   • Imme Petersen, Regine Kollek, Anne Brüninghaus, Martin Döring

   Pages 147-211

6. Science Policy of Systems Biology

   • Anne Brüninghaus, Imme Petersen, Regine Kollek, Martin Döring

   Pages 213-260

7. Systems Biology Goes Public: Representations in German and Austrian Print Media

   • Anne Brüninghaus, Martin Döring, Regine Kollek, Imme Petersen

   Pages 261-281

8. Back into Future: The Systems Biology to Come

   • Regine Kollek, Imme Petersen, Martin Döring, Anne Brüninghaus

   Pages 283-301

9. Back Matter

   Pages 303-316

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This collective monograph aims at contributing to an improved understanding of the epistemic presumptions, sociocultural implications and historically backgrounds of the newly emerging and currently expanding approach of systems biology. In doing so, it offers empirically grounded, valuable and reflexive information about a paradigmatic shift in the biosciences for a wide range of scientists working in the interdisciplinary areas of systems biology, synthetic biology, molecular biology, biology, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science and scientific knowledge, science and technology studies, technology assessment and the like. The authors of this monograph share the theoretical methodological premise that science is a culturally and socially embedded practice which characterizes our culture as a scientific one and at the same time draws its innovative potential from its socio-cultural context. This dialectic relationship lies at the heart of the current development of systems biology which is conceived as a so-called successor of ‘-omics’ research and triggered by high-throughput information technologies. At the same time a need for a holistic conceptualization of complex biological processes emerges. The title Contextualizing Systems Biology suggests that this book analyzes the development and advent of systems biology from different theoretical and methodological perspectives. We investigate a variety of contexts ranging from the analysis of cognitive contexts (such as basic theoretical concepts) to regulative contexts (policies) to the concrete application of a systems biology in the socio-scientific context of a European research project. In empirically analyzing these different and interrelated layers and dimensions of systems biology, the scope of the book goes beyond present attempts to investigate the advent of new approaches in the biological sciences as it frames and assesses systems biology from an interdisciplinary and integrated perspective.

• holism
• molecular biology
• science
• systems biology
• theory

• University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

  Martin Döring, Imme Petersen, Anne Brüninghaus, Regine Kollek

Policies and ethics