hosted by
Stazione Zoologica, Naples, May 17-20, 2007
organized by
Center of Science Studies, Estonian University of Life Sciences, Tartu
(Estonia)
INSERM ERM206 - TAGC, Marseille (France)
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (Germany)
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg
(Austria)
An important feature of the life sciences is that they always have
visualized their objects to a greater extent than physics or chemistry.
Since the early 19th century one extensively used hand-drawings,
professional illustrations, idealized diagrams, microphotography, and,
in the 20th century, time-lapse motion pictures to visualize the data
and to support one's own analyses. Nowadays the techniques expanded to
video and digital imaging, including virtual reality dissections and
rotating panoramas of embryonic features. In general, these scientific
images are means to store and exchange experi-mental data and to
further specialized knowledge of biological objects. The objects are
either an individual, like an embryo or egg, a cell or gene, or sets of
individuals like animals, plants, forests, or meadows. What
distinguishes them from physical entities are the facts that they are
visually flexible phenomena whose boundaries, extension and identifying
details are studied to explain life's dynamics and such processes like
embryogenesis, cell mor-phologies, or genes' networking.
To capture this visual specificity of the life sciences, the workshops
will focus (1) on the biological material considered in priority, e.g.
embryos, cells, and genes, (2) on the type of graphical representations
used, e.g. fate maps, cell lineages, or gene networks, and (3) on the
techniques employed to construct these graphs, e.g. hand drawings,
diagrams, tables, micro-photographs, time-lapse motion pictures, or
computer imaging.
This workshop brings to an issue the production of biological knowledge
on embryos, cells, and genes from the early 19th to in silico biology. For it, we will
compare the graphic models of
classical isciplines evoking lifelike images within the mind,
like embryology and cytology to most recent computer imaging
techniques. In terms of methodology we want to foster true
interdisciplinary work and communication, in particular combining
experts from the biological sciences and the humanities (history and
philosophy of sciences). Our discussions will serve several objectives.
For example, we will study biological objects and follow their traces
in different disciplines over time, we will examine the tools by which
biologists visualized their observations, and how they trained
themselves to 'observe' and to 'imagine' the pheno-menal forms of
biological bodies. Further we will elucidate in detail which
experimental procedures schooled the scientists to coordinate eyes and
hands when redrawing over and over again images of cells pushing
against each other, or fixing the boundaries of embryonic layers,
permanently moving and shifting their position inside an embryo.
Other epistemic questions we want to address here are how the
'graphs' relate to the experiments in question, or how the images
changed when more data accumulated. For, the workshops attempt to
underline the role of images as a vehicle of how the scientists
comprehend the object or phenomenon in question, and of how they
differentiate or unify biological diversity in coherent theories.
Indeed, scientific images do not map experimental reality in a
one-to-one correspondence because they result from a complex process of
production and transformation. In other words, scientific images
are models.
During the workshops biologists and scholars of science studies will
elucidate to what extent the images have served and still serve the
biologists to perceive and to cognize living entities. Thus, we will
also talk in detail on the scientist's perceptive habit and the
ambiguity of observing epistemic objects, which are at the same time
subjects changing their shape in time and space. The interdisciplinary
participants will offer a variety of foci when presenting the practicer
of scientific visualization, discussing the function and modi of visual
representation, or delimiting the role that images can play in
accepting a new 'theory'. Further, we will explore the emergence of
novel graphical representation strategies to cope with very large sets
of experimental data produced by functional genomic approaches.
Scientists involved in the growing field of systems biology
particularly stress the need for efficient representation and modelling
to enable the required interdisciplinary cooperation. In the process,
several other aspects are alluded to, e.g. the credibility of the
experimenter, or the visibility and communicability of science.
The biological scientists will present their own research on the
mechanism that coordinate cell movements with gene expression, on gene
regulatory networks, on the patterning of cell lineages, or on the
evolution of morphological characters. They will exemplify which tools
they use, e.g. hand drawings, diagrams, statistical tables, scanning
electron microscopy, video laser, digital imaging, or the formal
graphical representation. They will unravel how they analyze their
data, conceptualize their mental images, and formulate 'theories'. Each
'biological' presentation will be backed up by a historical and/or
philosophical one, either showing the continuity of research issues and
biological theories, or pointing out the distinctions to studies of the
life sciences of the 19th and 20th century.
Tentatively, the analyses presented in these workshops will contribute
to the development of a grammar of visual representation in the life
sciences. In any case, the universa in
picto and their fabrication from a period of nearly 200 years
will constitute the common theme.
Sabine Brauckmann . Christina Brandt
. Denis Thieffry . Gerd B. Müller
