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80Modeling Organogenesis from Biological First PrinciplesIn Matteo Mossio (ed.), Organization in Biology, Springer. pp. 263-283. 2023.Unlike inert objects, organisms and their cells have the ability to initiate activity by themselves and thus change their properties or states even in the absence of an external cause. This crucial difference led us to search for principles suitable for the study organisms. We propose that cells follow the default state of proliferation with variation and motility, a principle of biological inertia. This means that in the presence of sufficient nutrients, cells will express their default state. …Read more
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33Revisiting D.W. Smithers’s “Cancer: An Attack on Cytologism” (1962)Biological Theory 15 (4): 180-187. 2020.David Waldron Smithers was, among other things, a physician and a pioneer of cancer radiotherapy and a well-respected figure in British medicine and public health. From the 1940s until his retirement from medical practice in 1973, he was the director of the Radiotherapy Department at the Royal Marsden Hospital and London University Chair of Radiotherapy at the Institute of Cancer Research. Using massive amounts of clinical observations, which he interpreted from an organicist viewpoint, and his …Read more
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444Glycemia Regulation: From Feedback Loops to Organizational Closure.Frontiers in Physiology 11. 2020.Endocrinologists apply the idea of feedback loops to explain how hormones regulate certain bodily functions such as glucose metabolism. In particular, feedback loops focus on the maintenance of the plasma concentrations of glucose within a narrow range. Here, we put forward a different, organicist perspective on the endocrine regulation of glycaemia, by relying on the pivotal concept of closure of constraints. From this perspective, biological systems are understood as organized ones, which mean…Read more
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43Reductionism, Organicism, and Causality in the Biomedical Sciences: A CritiquePerspectives in Biology and Medicine 61 (4): 489-502. 2018.It would be ahistorical to ridicule vitalists. When one reads the writings of one of the leading vitalists like Driesch one is forced to agree with him that many of the basic problems of biology simply cannot be solved by a philosophy as that of Descartes, in which the organism is simply considered a machine…. The logic of the critique of the vitalists was impeccable.At the turn of the new millennium, concomitant with the development of the evo-devo and eco-devo disciplines within developmental …Read more
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Carole Fillière: L'esthetique ironique de Leopoldo Alas ClarínRevista de Hispanismo Filosófico 17 226. 2012.
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128On physicalism and downward causation in developmental and cancer biologyActa Biotheoretica 56 (4): 257-274. 2008.The dominant position in Philosophy of Science contends that downward causation is an illusion. Instead, we argue that downward causation doesn’t introduce vicious circles either in physics or in biology. We also question the metaphysical claim that “physical facts fix all the facts.” Downward causation does not imply any contradiction if we reject the assumption of the completeness and the causal closure of the physical world that this assertion contains. We provide an argument for rejecting th…Read more
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29The somatic mutation theory of cancer: growing problems with the paradigm?Bioessays 26 (10): 1097-1107. 2004.The somatic mutation theory has been the prevailing paradigm in cancer research for the last 50 years. Its premises are: (1) cancer is derived from a single somatic cell that has accumulated multiple DNA mutations, (2) the default state of cell proliferation in metazoa is quiescence, and (3) cancer is a disease of cell proliferation caused by mutations in genes that control proliferation and the cell cycle. From this compelling simplicity, an increasingly complicated picture has emerged as more …Read more
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130Emergentism by default: A view from the benchSynthese 151 (3): 361-376. 2006.For the last 50 years the dominant stance in experimental biology has been reductionism in general, and genetic reductionism in particular. Philosophers were the first to realize that the belief that the Mendelian genes were reduced to DNA molecules was questionable. Soon, experimental data confirmed these misgivings. The optimism of molecular biologists, fueled by early success in tackling relatively simple problems has now been tempered by the difficulties encountered when applying the same si…Read more
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131The tissue organization field theory of cancer: A testable replacement for the somatic mutation theoryBioessays 33 (5): 332-340. 2011.The somatic mutation theory (SMT) of cancer has been and remains the prevalent theory attempting to explain how neoplasms arise and progress. This theory proposes that cancer is a clonal, cell‐based disease, and implicitly assumes that quiescence is the default state of cells in multicellular organisms. The SMT has not been rigorously tested, and several lines of evidence raise questions that are not addressed by this theory. Herein, we propose experimental strategies that may validate the SMT. …Read more
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17One hundred years of somatic mutation theory of carcinogenesis: Is it time to switch?Bioessays 36 (1): 118-120. 2014.
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34Response to “In defense of the somatic mutation theory of cancer”Bioessays 33 (9): 657-659. 2011.
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Tufts UniversityRegular Faculty
Medford, Massachusetts, United States of America