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4Towards a Notion of Intervention in Big-Data Biology and Molecular MedicineIn Marco Nathan & Giovanni Boniolo (eds.), Foundational Issues in Molecular Medicine, Routledge. 2016.We claim that in contemporary studies in molecular biology and biomedicine, the nature of ‘manipulation’ and ‘intervention’ has changed. Traditionally, molecular biology and molecular studies in medicine are considered experimental sciences, whereas experiments take the form of material manipulation and intervention. On the contrary “big science” projects in biology focus on the practice of data mining of biological databases. We argue that the practice of data mining is a form of intervention a…Read more
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153NCG 4.0: the network of cancer genes in the era of massive mutational screenings of cancer genomesDatabase: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation 2014. 2014.NCG 4.0 is the latest update of the Network of Cancer Genes, a web-based repository of systems-level properties of cancer genes. In its current version, the database collects information on 537 known (i.e. experimentally supported) and 1463 candidate (i.e. inferred using statistical methods) cancer genes. Candidate cancer genes derive from the manual revision of 67 original publications describing the mutational screening of 3460 human exomes and genomes in 23 different cancer types. For all 200…Read more
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9The End of 'Small Biology'? Some Thoughts About Biomedicine and Big ScienceBig Data and Society 1-6. 2016.In biology—as in other scientific fields—there is a lively opposition between big and small science projects. In this commentary, I try to contextualize this opposition in the field of biomedicine, and I argue that, at least in this context, big science projects should come first.
Bristol, Bristol, City of, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Computing and Information |
Philosophy of Science, Misc |