Book description
“Honorable mention - Biomedicine and Neuroscience, 2011 Prose Awards”
An examination of how the cell should be described in order to
effectively process biological data
"The fruitful pursuit of biological knowledge requires one to
take Einstein's admonition [on science without epistemology] as a
practical demand for scientific research, to recognize Waddington's
characterization of the subject matter of biology, and to embrace
Wiener's conception of the form of biological knowledge in response to
its subject matter. It is from this vantage point that we consider the
epistemology of the cell."
-from the Preface
In the era of high biological data throughput, biomedical engineers
need a more systematic knowledge of the cell in order to perform more
effective data handling. Epistemology of the Cell is the first
authored book to break down this knowledge. This text examines the
place of biological knowledge within the framework of science as a
whole and addresses issues focused on the specific nature of biology,
how biology is studied, and how biological knowledge is translated
into applications, in particular with regard to medicine.
The book opens with a general discussion of the historical
development of human understanding of scientific knowledge, the
scientific method, and the manner in which scientific knowledge is
represented in mathematics. The narrative then gets specific for
biology, focusing on knowledge of the cell, the basic unit of life.
The salient point is the analogy between a systems-based analysis of
factory regulation and the regulation of the cell. Each chapter
represents a key topic of current interest, including:
-
Causality and randomness
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Translational science
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Stochastic validation: classification
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Stochastic validation: networks
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Model-based experimentation in biology
Epistemology of the Cell is written for biomedical researchers
whose interests include bioinformatics, biological modeling,
biostatistics, and biological signal processing.
EDWARD R. DOUGHERTY, PhD, is Director of the
Genomic Signal Processing Laboratory at Texas A&M University,
where he holds the Robert M. Kennedy '26 Chair and is Professor in the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is also
co-Director of the Computational Biology Division at the Translational
Genomics Research Institute as well as Adjunct Professor in the
Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, M. D. Anderson
Cancer Center at the University of Texas. Dr. Dougherty has published
more than 300 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters.
MICHAEL L. BITTNER, PhD, is co-Director and Senior Investigator
at the Computational Biology Division at the Translational Genomics
Research Institute. Previously, he was associate investigator in the
Cancer Genetics Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute
at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Bittner holds a dozen
patents and has published more than 100 articles.
