Call for Applications: Second European Advanced Seminar in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences--In Vivo, ex Vivo, in Vitro, in Silico: Models in the Life Sciences
Call for Applications: Second European Advanced Seminar in the Philosophy
of the Life Sciences--In Vivo, ex Vivo, in Vitro, in Silico: Models in the
Life Sciences
Hosted by the Brocher Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland, September 10-14, 2012
Participating Institutions
Brocher Foundation
ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society, University of Exeter (Exeter, UK)
European School for Molecular Medicine (Milan, I)
Institut d'Histoire de la Médecine et de la Santé (Geneva, CH)
Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques,
Paris-1 Sorbonne (Paris, F)
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (Altenberg, A)
University of Bielefeld (Bielefeld, D)
Directors of the Seminar
Bernardino Fantini (Geneva), Philippe Huneman (Paris), Marcel Weber (Geneva)
The European Advanced School for the Philosophy of Life Sciences will hold
its meeting on September 10-14 at the Brocher Foundation (Geneva), on the
topic: In Vivo, ex Vivo, in Vitro, in Silico: Models in the Life Sciences
PhD students and early career researchers from a large spectrum of
disciplines and interests in history and philosophy of biology as well as
life sciences are invited to submit an application, by sending a letter of
motivation, CV and abstract in a single file:
name-easpls2012.pdf to Philippe Hunemann at
huneman@wanadoo.fr<mailto:huneman@wanadoo.fr>
Deadline for applications: March 19, 2012
Applications will be evaluated and applicants will be notified acceptance
before the end of May.
EASPLS: General presentation
The European Advanced School for the Philosophy of Life Sciences is
organized by six top level institutions in the philosophy and history of
life sciences and aims at fostering research, advancement of students and
collaborations in the field of the philosophy of biomedical sciences.
After a preliminary meeting of the EASPLS in Gorino Sullam (Italy) in
2008, the first EASPLS "Causation and disease in the post-genomic era" was
held at the Brocher Foundation in September 2010, as the 2012 will be.
Meetings are planned to be held every other year. The Brocher Foundation
is located in Hermance, near Geneva, in a beautiful setting along the Lake
Léman. The accommodation will be a hotel situated next to the Foundation.
Registration fee: 550 Chf, including room and board.
The Brocher Foundation provides a limited number of fellowships to support
junior participants. Those wishing to apply for these fellowships should
do so in a separate letter and include it in their application file.
The schedule mixes presentations of senior researchers, postdoctoral
researchers and PhD students. The selected contributors will be either
asked to give a paper on the topic they propose, or asked to comment on
one of the senior researchers' presentations, according to decision of the
committee based on the examination of the set of applications. Each
presentation lasts 40mn with a 20mn comment and discussion. People who do
not want to comment on a paper should make this clear in the application.
Some papers resulting from the meeting will be selected for submission to
a special issue of History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, as it was
the case for papers of the last EASPLS. Publication will be subject to the
normal peer review process of the journal.
The topic: In Vivo, ex Vivo, in Vitro, in Silico: Models in Life Sciences.
This topic is very broad, timely, and of theoretical and methodological
interest for philosophers as well as for medical researchers and
biologists.
As mathematician, economist and physicist John von Neumann put it in a
provocative way 60 years ago: "The sciences do not try to explain, they
hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models." All sciences
indeed make models of phenomena, in order to describe them in a way which
makes salient their most explanatory features regarding at least the
questions we are asking. Models can take many forms, including analytical
models, viz., sets of ordinary or partial differential equations (e.g.,
the Lotka-Volterra equations in population genetics), or computer models
(e.g., cellular automata, agent based models, logical approaches to
computation, etc.), i.e., in silico models. But in the life sciences there
are also "in vivo models" - organisms whose study is supposed to provide
an understanding of much more encompassing phenomena. Most famous is the
Drosophila melanogaster used by geneticists and molecular biologists;
mice, nematodes (e.g., Caenorhabditis elegans), the plant Aradobipsis
thaliana, and all the bacteria used for experimenting on long term
evolution are other prominent "model organisms." These raise specific
epistemological problems. Medicine appeals to model organisms constantly
as clinical trials on human beings should be the last step only of a
methodical set of experiments on non-human subjects, so that the risk of
the human trials are maximally minimized.
There are also in vitro studies, which isolate specific living processes
and reproduce them in laboratory conditions - a common method in
biochemistry, cell biology, molecular genetics, etc. Here, what is going
on in test tubes is supposed to model the real processes taking place in
organisms, or in nature in general, whereas many conditions of these real
processes are simply neglected - above all, the fact that they take place
in a living organism. This method stimulated criticisms from the
beginnings of physiology in the 18th century, where vitalist physicians
accused experimental biologists of studying mere artifacts, since those
phenomena are part of the whole organism in its natural environment, from
which the scientist abstracts away. However, countless are the results
acquired since two centuries thanks to those models.
For a long time philosophy of science focused on theories - and whether
they find out 'laws of nature' - according to the framework defined by
logical positivism in the 1930s. Since the 1970s, many doubts have been
cast on this framework. Alternative views of science flourished, and many
philosophers of science turned to studying the epistemological nature of
scientific modeling. They made significant advances about the kind of
knowledge models do provide, their relationships with theories, laws of
nature or experiments, as well as the consequences of a conception of
models for the debates about realism vs. instrumentalism, the criteria and
importance of reasonable assumptions in designing models, etc. They
distinguished mathematical and simulated models, they identified epistemic
values such as genericity, realism or precision, which may not be
reachable at the same time (as ecologist Richard Levins pointed out in
1966), triggering a considerable amount of debates in the field. They
questioned cases where one has several different models for the same
phenomenon, and what this means for explanatory pluralism. They also
considered inverse cases where several different phenomena have a common
model, like in the case of behavioral ecology and microeconomics, which
can both be modeled through game theory. Robustness analysis, as a way to
cope with the plurality of models has been scrutinized.
However, the use of the four kinds of models - in vitro, in vivo, ex vivo,
in silico - in the life sciences brings to the fore many particular
issues, because the scientific knowledge in this case is produced through
the entanglement of those four kinds of models. Model organisms raise, for
sure, specific problems, such as: how can we generalize from experiments
on this organism, to teachings about a genus, a family, a clade, or even
(as it is the case on molecular genetics) to all living beings? Given that
the living world has been shaped by evolution, and that the key properties
of being which evolve under natural selection are diversity and variety,
it would not be reasonable to expect many universally shared properties
across living families; therefore this issue of the scope of what we learn
from model organisms is crucial. Much work still needs to be done in order
to understand how model organisms interact with in silico, ex vivo, and
biochemical models, as well as with computer simulation and mathematical
frameworks, in order to produce knowledge.
http://histmed.unige.ch/
of the Life Sciences--In Vivo, ex Vivo, in Vitro, in Silico: Models in the
Life Sciences
Hosted by the Brocher Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland, September 10-14, 2012
Participating Institutions
Brocher Foundation
ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society, University of Exeter (Exeter, UK)
European School for Molecular Medicine (Milan, I)
Institut d'Histoire de la Médecine et de la Santé (Geneva, CH)
Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques,
Paris-1 Sorbonne (Paris, F)
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (Altenberg, A)
University of Bielefeld (Bielefeld, D)
Directors of the Seminar
Bernardino Fantini (Geneva), Philippe Huneman (Paris), Marcel Weber (Geneva)
The European Advanced School for the Philosophy of Life Sciences will hold
its meeting on September 10-14 at the Brocher Foundation (Geneva), on the
topic: In Vivo, ex Vivo, in Vitro, in Silico: Models in the Life Sciences
PhD students and early career researchers from a large spectrum of
disciplines and interests in history and philosophy of biology as well as
life sciences are invited to submit an application, by sending a letter of
motivation, CV and abstract in a single file:
name-easpls2012.pdf to Philippe Hunemann at
huneman@wanadoo.fr<mailto:huneman@wanadoo.fr>
Deadline for applications: March 19, 2012
Applications will be evaluated and applicants will be notified acceptance
before the end of May.
EASPLS: General presentation
The European Advanced School for the Philosophy of Life Sciences is
organized by six top level institutions in the philosophy and history of
life sciences and aims at fostering research, advancement of students and
collaborations in the field of the philosophy of biomedical sciences.
After a preliminary meeting of the EASPLS in Gorino Sullam (Italy) in
2008, the first EASPLS "Causation and disease in the post-genomic era" was
held at the Brocher Foundation in September 2010, as the 2012 will be.
Meetings are planned to be held every other year. The Brocher Foundation
is located in Hermance, near Geneva, in a beautiful setting along the Lake
Léman. The accommodation will be a hotel situated next to the Foundation.
Registration fee: 550 Chf, including room and board.
The Brocher Foundation provides a limited number of fellowships to support
junior participants. Those wishing to apply for these fellowships should
do so in a separate letter and include it in their application file.
The schedule mixes presentations of senior researchers, postdoctoral
researchers and PhD students. The selected contributors will be either
asked to give a paper on the topic they propose, or asked to comment on
one of the senior researchers' presentations, according to decision of the
committee based on the examination of the set of applications. Each
presentation lasts 40mn with a 20mn comment and discussion. People who do
not want to comment on a paper should make this clear in the application.
Some papers resulting from the meeting will be selected for submission to
a special issue of History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, as it was
the case for papers of the last EASPLS. Publication will be subject to the
normal peer review process of the journal.
The topic: In Vivo, ex Vivo, in Vitro, in Silico: Models in Life Sciences.
This topic is very broad, timely, and of theoretical and methodological
interest for philosophers as well as for medical researchers and
biologists.
As mathematician, economist and physicist John von Neumann put it in a
provocative way 60 years ago: "The sciences do not try to explain, they
hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models." All sciences
indeed make models of phenomena, in order to describe them in a way which
makes salient their most explanatory features regarding at least the
questions we are asking. Models can take many forms, including analytical
models, viz., sets of ordinary or partial differential equations (e.g.,
the Lotka-Volterra equations in population genetics), or computer models
(e.g., cellular automata, agent based models, logical approaches to
computation, etc.), i.e., in silico models. But in the life sciences there
are also "in vivo models" - organisms whose study is supposed to provide
an understanding of much more encompassing phenomena. Most famous is the
Drosophila melanogaster used by geneticists and molecular biologists;
mice, nematodes (e.g., Caenorhabditis elegans), the plant Aradobipsis
thaliana, and all the bacteria used for experimenting on long term
evolution are other prominent "model organisms." These raise specific
epistemological problems. Medicine appeals to model organisms constantly
as clinical trials on human beings should be the last step only of a
methodical set of experiments on non-human subjects, so that the risk of
the human trials are maximally minimized.
There are also in vitro studies, which isolate specific living processes
and reproduce them in laboratory conditions - a common method in
biochemistry, cell biology, molecular genetics, etc. Here, what is going
on in test tubes is supposed to model the real processes taking place in
organisms, or in nature in general, whereas many conditions of these real
processes are simply neglected - above all, the fact that they take place
in a living organism. This method stimulated criticisms from the
beginnings of physiology in the 18th century, where vitalist physicians
accused experimental biologists of studying mere artifacts, since those
phenomena are part of the whole organism in its natural environment, from
which the scientist abstracts away. However, countless are the results
acquired since two centuries thanks to those models.
For a long time philosophy of science focused on theories - and whether
they find out 'laws of nature' - according to the framework defined by
logical positivism in the 1930s. Since the 1970s, many doubts have been
cast on this framework. Alternative views of science flourished, and many
philosophers of science turned to studying the epistemological nature of
scientific modeling. They made significant advances about the kind of
knowledge models do provide, their relationships with theories, laws of
nature or experiments, as well as the consequences of a conception of
models for the debates about realism vs. instrumentalism, the criteria and
importance of reasonable assumptions in designing models, etc. They
distinguished mathematical and simulated models, they identified epistemic
values such as genericity, realism or precision, which may not be
reachable at the same time (as ecologist Richard Levins pointed out in
1966), triggering a considerable amount of debates in the field. They
questioned cases where one has several different models for the same
phenomenon, and what this means for explanatory pluralism. They also
considered inverse cases where several different phenomena have a common
model, like in the case of behavioral ecology and microeconomics, which
can both be modeled through game theory. Robustness analysis, as a way to
cope with the plurality of models has been scrutinized.
However, the use of the four kinds of models - in vitro, in vivo, ex vivo,
in silico - in the life sciences brings to the fore many particular
issues, because the scientific knowledge in this case is produced through
the entanglement of those four kinds of models. Model organisms raise, for
sure, specific problems, such as: how can we generalize from experiments
on this organism, to teachings about a genus, a family, a clade, or even
(as it is the case on molecular genetics) to all living beings? Given that
the living world has been shaped by evolution, and that the key properties
of being which evolve under natural selection are diversity and variety,
it would not be reasonable to expect many universally shared properties
across living families; therefore this issue of the scope of what we learn
from model organisms is crucial. Much work still needs to be done in order
to understand how model organisms interact with in silico, ex vivo, and
biochemical models, as well as with computer simulation and mathematical
frameworks, in order to produce knowledge.
http://histmed.unige.ch/