I have been reading Anya Plutynski's book Explaining Cancer; it is one of the richest and well-researched books on the current state of cancer research and to understand, why it is so difficult to find a cure. Her background in philosophy brings more rigor to the book. It is not an easy read but you will learn so much from it.
One of the central aims of this book is to argue that understanding cancer requires both the decomposition of parts and processes involved in cancer at the cell and molecular levels ("drilling down") and "scaling up" to the macro level, or examining cancer's historical origins and remote causes, complex organizations, and dynamics.
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How does all this bear on cancer and on explaining and understanding cancer? Steve Frank once said (personal communication) that for a cancer scientist with interests in metabolic features of cancer, everything of interest in cancer can be explained in metabolism, whereas for a cancer scientist interested in stem cells, everything of interest in cancer can be explained by stem cells. Frank was making a joke, but it is a telling one; each scientist investigating one of the several ways of decomposing the casual factors of relevance to cancer is likely to see such factors as centrally important to many, if not all, aspects of cancer initiation and progression. But of course, no one scientist is going to give us the whole picture. This could be predicted for descriptively and interactionally complex systems. This interactive complexity of organisms has massive implications both for our study of living things and for our study of how they break down.
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Cancer is a vivid instance of a descriptively and interactively complex causal process. Thinking about cancer as an instance of an interactively complex system can help us think more carefully about how to do science, as well as the nature of the biological world and ourselves as part of that world.
One of the central aims of this book is to argue that understanding cancer requires both the decomposition of parts and processes involved in cancer at the cell and molecular levels ("drilling down") and "scaling up" to the macro level, or examining cancer's historical origins and remote causes, complex organizations, and dynamics.
[---]
How does all this bear on cancer and on explaining and understanding cancer? Steve Frank once said (personal communication) that for a cancer scientist with interests in metabolic features of cancer, everything of interest in cancer can be explained in metabolism, whereas for a cancer scientist interested in stem cells, everything of interest in cancer can be explained by stem cells. Frank was making a joke, but it is a telling one; each scientist investigating one of the several ways of decomposing the casual factors of relevance to cancer is likely to see such factors as centrally important to many, if not all, aspects of cancer initiation and progression. But of course, no one scientist is going to give us the whole picture. This could be predicted for descriptively and interactionally complex systems. This interactive complexity of organisms has massive implications both for our study of living things and for our study of how they break down.
[---]
Cancer is a vivid instance of a descriptively and interactively complex causal process. Thinking about cancer as an instance of an interactively complex system can help us think more carefully about how to do science, as well as the nature of the biological world and ourselves as part of that world.
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