Main description:

Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Theory and Practice aims at a systematic investigation of a number of foundational issues in the field of molecular medicine. The volume is organized around four broad modules focusing, respectively, on the following key aspects: What are the nature, scope, and limits of molecular medicine? How does it provide explanations? How does it represent and model phenomena of interest? How does it infer new knowledge from data and experiments? The essays collected here, authored by prominent scientists and philosophers of science, focus on a handful of mainstream topics in the philosophical literature, such as causation, explanation, modeling, and scientific inference. These previously unpublished contributions shed new light on these traditional topics by integrating them with problems, methods, and results from three prominent areas of contemporary biomedical science: basic research, translational and clinical research, and clinical practice.

Contents:

Introduction

Giovanni Boniolo and Marco J. Nathan

Part 1: Nature, Origins, and Scope

Chap. 1: Molecular medicine: the clinical method enters the lab. What tumor heterogeneity and primary tumor culture teach us

Giovanni Boniolo

Chap. 2: Personalized Medicine: Historical Roots of a Medical Model

Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio and Francesco Spoering

Chap. 3: From the concept of genetic disease to the geneticization of diseases: analyzing and solving the paradox of contemporary medical genetics

Marie Darrason

Part 2: Explanation

Chap. 4: Molecular complexity: Why has psychiatry not been revolutionized by genomics (yet)?

Mael Lemoine

Chap. 5: How cancer spreads: reconceptualizing a disease

Katherine E. Liu, Alan C. Love, and Michael Travisano

Chap. 6: Evolutionary Perspectives on Molecular Medicine: Cancer from an Evolutionary Perspective

Anya Plutynski

Part 3: Representation and Modeling

Chap. 7: Towards a Notion of Intervention in Big-Data Biology and Molecular Medicine

Federico Boem and Emanuele Ratti

Chap. 8: Pathways to the clinic: cancer stem cells and challenges for translational research

Melinda Bonnie Fagan

Chap. 9: Counterfactual Reasoning in Molecular Medicine

Marco J. Nathan

Part 4: Inference

Chap. 10: Forms of Extrapolation in Molecular Medicine

Pierre-Luc Germain and Tudor Baetu

Chap. 11: Testing Oncological Treatments in the Era of Personalized Medicine

David Teira

Chap. 12: Opportunities and challenges of molecular epidemiology

Federica Russo and Paolo Vineis