The Return of the Organism in the Biosciences: Theoretical, Historical, and Social Dimensions

个性是人类社会的一个关键概念。我们如何定义个人及其界限影响着我们的社会关系，我们拥有什么样的权利和义务，以及我们什么时候被认为是健康的或生病的。在所有这些领域中，人类个性的生物方面——有机体——起着至关重要的作用。目前，在被基因的范式主导了几十年之后，有机体的概念正在生物和生物医学科学中卷土重来。有机体再次被认为是一个因果有效的、自主的、活跃的单位，超越了基因的特性——特别是在表观遗传学、生态位构建理论和进化发育生物学等领域。本项目从科学史和科学哲学的综合视角来考察这些最新的发展。它侧重于(i)生物理论和概念，（ii）历史，以及（iii）今天的“有机体的回归”的社会和人类学维度。特别是，它旨在为21世纪以生物为中心的生物科学的理论和社会挑战提供解决方案。这涉及到一个问题，(i)尽管生物越来越被认为是积极构建自身发展和环境的主体，但大型基因组数据集也显示，它们与物质和社会环境有着不可分割的联系，并完全嵌入其中。这种模棱两可的个人新特征——既要突出，又要消失——在生物科学中导致了各种方法和解释上的挑战。这种复杂的现状可以更好地理解（ii），当与生物学历史上的各个时期，特别是在20世纪初，有机体成为生物学的中心单位。为了确定相关的概念辩论和解决方案，他们提供了相对于今天的挑战，档案研究与文本挖掘的方法相结合。最后，本项目调查（iii）当前生物学中个人主义和反个人主义的发展如何推动个性化医疗和公共卫生辩论的趋势。首先，这包括个人作为自主医疗保健代理人的新责任，但也包括对社会他律的新担忧。其次，这种有机体的模糊地位引发了关于政策干预的合适目标——个人还是集体（例如社会和种族群体）——以对抗癌症和肥胖等疾病的辩论。这包括生物医学趋势回归到种族分类，以研究环境嵌入个体的疾病易感性。

Individuality is a key concept in human societies. How we define individuals and their boundaries affects our social relations, what kind of rights and duties we have, as well as when we are considered healthy or sick. In all these realms, the biological side of humans’ individuality – the organism – plays a crucial role. Currently, after many decades dominated by the paradigm of the gene, the concept of organism is making a comeback in the bio- and biomedical sciences. The organism is again recognized as a causally efficacious, autonomous, and active unit that transcends the properties of genes – especially in fields like epigenetics, niche construction theory, and evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-Devo). This project investigates these recent developments from a perspective of integrated history and philosophy of science. It focuses on (i) biotheoretical and conceptual, (ii) historical, as well as (iii) social and anthropological dimensions of today’s 'return of the organism'. Especially, it aims at offering solutions for theoretical and societal challenges of organism-centered biosciences in the 21st century. This concerns the problem, (i) that while organisms are increasingly recognized as agents that actively construct their own development and their environments, large genomic datasets also reveal that they are inextricable linked with and fully embedded in their material and social environment. This ambiguous new character of the individual – to stand out and at the same time to disappear – leads to various methodological and explanatory challenges in the biosciences. This complex current situation can better be understood (ii) when compared to periods in the history of biology, especially in the early 20th century, in which the organism emerged as a central unit in biology. In order to identify the relevant conceptual debates and the solutions they offer with respect to today’s challenges, archival research is combined with methods of text mining. Finally, this project investigates (iii) how current individualistic and anti-individualistic developments in biology drive trends in personalized medicine and public health debates. This includes, first, novel responsibilities of individuals as self-determined health care agents, but also new worries about social heteronomy. Second, the ambiguous status of the organism stirs debates about suitable targets of policy interventions – individuals or collectives (e.g., social and ethnic groups) – to combat diseases such as cancer and obesity. This includes the biomedical trend to return to racial classifications for studying disease susceptibilities of environmentally embedded individuals.