Biology is a science. It can be defined as all of human knowledge acquired in a specific field. It began with « zero » knowledge and moves towards a sort of « absolute » knowledge… and is now somewhere on the long, difficult path leading to this absolute.
This science studies living beings. Living beings are composed of cells. The path leading to this knowledge must pass logically through the following stages:
- discovery of the existence of cells…
- study of their different components and the role they play…
- study and understanding how cells work, in the case of uni- and multicellular organisms…
- understanding of the normal functioning of complex organisms, and their gradual transition from egg to embryo, from embryo to youth, from youth to adulthood, old age and death…
- the notion of disease
And a question arises : where are we today ?
- If the first step mentioned above (the discovery of the existence of cells) dates back to 1665 with the development of a rudimentary microscope by Hooke …, the true cell theory, stating that living organisms only consist of cells, was created in 1839 with the work of Schleiden and Schwann.
- The second stage (study of the different cell components and the role they play…) has made in recent decades tremendous progress through the development of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and regulomics (I hope to forget nothing…).
- This second stage seems now sufficiently advanced in order to allow the scientific community to engage with enthusiasm the in steps 3, 4 and 5 mentioned above, thanks to new approaches titled integrative biology, systems biology, predictive biology, synthetic biology and theoretical biology. Approaches involving biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, biochemists, physicists and statisticians, whose ambition is to understand and predict the normal or abnormal functioning of cells, complex organisms or ecosystems, according to the environments and their interactions. A very long-term work, requiring huge resources.
In this context, one can seriously ask a second question: Is Grandpa’s biology simple or simplistic? or in other words: Is Grandpa wrong by considering that notions of balance and regulation are two sides of the same problem, or did he set obviously a fact of life that the scientific community will one day be obliged to consider?
To you to form your opinion. In any case, « Grandpa’s biology » is only now the point of view of Grandpa, a retired agronomist who in his youth spent several years in a laboratory of the INRA, his function beeing then to study the mode of action of plant growth hormones in the case of host/parasite relation existing between a variety of tomato and a pathogenic fungus.
JOSEPHINE
PS. I have called this document « The biology of Grandpa » because Grandpa is my father, and in order to permit to his grandchildren, with all the children in the world, to say, one day, studying their lessons: That’s Grandpa’s biology!”
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