In zwei Beiträgen aus dem Jahre 2006 setzen sich Andrew C. Ahn, Muneesh Tewari, Chi-Sang Poon und Russell S. Phillips mit der Frage auseinander, was die klinische Medizin, die im wesentlichen reduktionistisch ausgelegt ist,  von einer systemisch orientierten Biologie lernen kann. Die Texte sind in PLoS Med erschienen und als Open Access verfügbar. In der Einleitung zum ersten Text heißt es:„Since Descartes and the Renaissance, science, including medicine, has taken a distinct path in its analytical evaluation of the natural world. This approach can be described as one of “divide and conquer,” and it is rooted in the assumption that complex problems are solvable by dividing them into smaller, simpler, and thus more tractable units. Because the processes are “reduced” into more basic units, this approach has been termed “reductionism” and has been the predominant paradigm of science over the past two centuries. Reductionism pervades the medical sciences and affects the way we diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases. While it has been responsible for tremendous successes in modern medicine, there are limits to reductionism, and an alternative explanation must be sought to complement it. The alternative explanation that has received much recent attention, due to systems biology, is the systems perspective. Rather than dividing a complex problem into its component parts, the systems perspective appreciates the holistic and composite characteristics of a problem and evaluates the problem with the use of computational and mathematical tools. The systems perspective is rooted in the assumption that the forest cannot be explained by studying the trees individually. In order for a systems perspective to be fully appreciated, however, we must first recognize the reductionist nature of medical science and understand its limitations. For this reason, the first article in this series is dedicated to examining the reductionist approach that pervades medicine and to explaining how a systems approach (as advocated by systems biology) may complement it. In the second article, we aim to provide a more practical discussion of how a systems approach would affect clinical medicine. We hope that these discussions can stimulate further inquiry into the clinical implications of systems principles“
Zum ersten Teil („The Limits of Reductionism in Medicine: Could Systems Biology Offer an Alternative?“) geht es hier, zum zweiten („The Clinical Applications of a Systems Approach“) hier entlang…