What’s New about Systems Biology? I was recently invited to an inter-disciplinary workshop held at the Institute of Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle, where HPS scholars and scientists met to address the question: What’s new about ‘Systems Biology’? The workshop was organized by Arizona State University’s (ASU) Center for Biology and Society, in partnership with [...]
An interview with Rotman Institute Visiting Fellow John Bolender John Bolender has been a Visiting Fellow in the Rotman Institute during the 2011-2012 academic year. He is a philosopher of mind whose primary interest is cognition. Specifically, he has inquired into how the computational core of language may crucially enter into uniquely human cognitive capacities, [...]
Historically, most philosophers and scientists have thought about the distinction between life and non-life as an abrupt one. For vitalists like Driesch life was an irreducible phenomenon, which depended on a new type of force, one of a non-physical nature (an entelechy or a “vis essentialis”). For emergentists like Broad, life depended on the way [...]
In a recent Slate magazine article, Douglas Pet highlights several worries with the international surrogacy industry, particularly in respect to the poor women who contract out their gestational labor. Pet focuses on India, and rightfully so--one report predicts that by the end of 2012, the medical travel industry in India (also a hotspot for organ transplants) [...]