Epistemology of the Cell : A Systems Perspective on Biological 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 development of human understanding of scientific knowledge and method. The book gets specific 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. The book also includes information on translational science.

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 I. 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.