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51Reuniting philosophy and science to advance cancer researchBiological Reviews 98 (5): 1668-1686. 2023.Cancers rely on multiple, heterogeneous processes at different scales, pertaining to many biomedical fields. Therefore, understanding cancer is necessarily an interdisciplinary task that requires placing specialised experimental and clinical research into a broader conceptual, theoretical, and methodological framework. Without such a framework, oncology will collect piecemeal results, with scant dialogue between the different scientific communities studying cancer. We argue that one important wa…Read more
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1La célébration du cinquantenaire d’"HUMANISME INTEGRAL à OttawaMaritain Studies/Etudes Maritainiennes 3 3-9. 1987.
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23M. B. Fagan : Philosophy of Stem Cell Biology: Knowledge in Flesh and Blood: Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2013, xx+274 pp, illus, $92.00History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 36 (1): 146-148. 2014.
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92Junk or functional DNA? ENCODE and the function controversyBiology and Philosophy 29 (6): 807-831. 2014.In its last round of publications in September 2012, the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) assigned a biochemical function to most of the human genome, which was taken up by the media as meaning the end of ‘Junk DNA’. This provoked a heated reaction from evolutionary biologists, who among other things claimed that ENCODE adopted a wrong and much too inclusive notion of function, making its dismissal of junk DNA merely rhetorical. We argue that this criticism rests on misunderstandings concer…Read more
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1L'association Canadienne Jacques Maritain, 1979-1989Maritain Studies/Etudes Maritainiennes 6 7-24. 1990.
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56A relic of design: against proper functions in biologyBiology and Philosophy 37 (4): 1-28. 2022.The notion of biological function is fraught with difficulties—intrinsically and irremediably so, we argue. The physiological practice of functional ascription originates from a time when organisms were thought to be designed and remained largely unchanged since. In a secularized worldview, this creates a paradox which accounts of functions as selected effect attempt to resolve. This attempt, we argue, misses its target in physiology and it brings problems of its own. Instead, we propose that a …Read more
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17Book ForumStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 84 101324. 2020.
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22S abina L eonelli, Data - centric biology: a philosophical study, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016, 275 pp., $35/24.5 (review)History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 40 (3): 57. 2018.
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30The European politics of animal experimentation: From Victorian Britain to ‘Stop Vivisection’Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 64 75-87. 2017.
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43Metastasis as supra-cellular selection? A reply to Lean and PlutynskiBiology and Philosophy 32 (2): 281-287. 2017.In response to Germain argument that evolution by natural selection has a limited explanatory power in cancer, Lean and Plutynski have recently argued that many adaptations in cancer only make sense at the tumor level, and that cancer progression mirrors the major evolutionary transitions. While we agree that selection could potentially act at various levels of organization in cancers, we argue that tumor-level selection is unlikely to actually play a relevant role in our understanding of the so…Read more
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3A l'Auditorium des Anciens: Une soirée en hommage aux Pères Oblats qui ont enseigné à la Faculté de philosophie de l'Université d'OttawaMaritain Studies/Etudes Maritainiennes 2 5-8. 1986.
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30From replica to instruments: animal models in biomedical researchHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 36 (1): 114-128. 2014.The ways in which other animal species can be informative about human biology are not exhausted by the traditional picture of the animal model. In this paper, I propose to distinguish two roles which laboratory organisms can have in biomedical research. In the more traditional case, organisms act as surrogates for human beings, and as such are expected to be more manageable replicas of humans. However, animal models can inform us about human biology in a much less straightforward way, by being u…Read more
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A l'Auditorium des Anciens: Une soirée en hommage aux Pères Oblats qui ont enseigné à la Faculté de philosophie de l'Université d'OttawaMaritain Studies/Etudes Maritainiennes 2 5-8. 1986.
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47What mechanisms can’t do: Explanatory frameworks and the function of the p53 gene in molecular oncologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3): 374-384. 2013.What has been called the new mechanistic philosophy conceives of mechanisms as the main providers of biological explanation. We draw on the characterization of the p53 gene in molecular oncology, to show that explaining a biological phenomenon implies instead a dynamic interaction between the mechanistic level—rendered at the appropriate degree of ontological resolution—and far more general explanatory tools that perform a fundamental epistemic role in the provision of biological explanations. W…Read more
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1030Cancer cells and adaptive explanationsBiology and Philosophy 27 (6): 785-810. 2012.The aim of this paper is to assess the relevance of somatic evolution by natural selection to our understanding of cancer development. I do so in two steps. In the first part of the paper, I ask to what extent cancer cells meet the formal requirements for evolution by natural selection, relying on Godfrey-Smith’s (2009) framework of Darwinian populations. I argue that although they meet the minimal requirements for natural selection, cancer cells are not paradigmatic Darwinian populations. In t…Read more
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Biology |