[Biological reductionism and the medicine of the 21st century]

Abstract

They were bothered by the fact that biological science, which was focusing on individual parts of the living systems in the hope that their knowledge should help understand the organization and principles of the living systems' existence, would be at a deadlock sooner or later. The development of fundamental molecular sciences proves them to be actually in a crisis. I would like to show, in this review, that the elevated expectations of a radical revolution in the field of fundamental biological sciences and in applied spheres, particularly, in practical medicine, which are due to the progress of high-effective technologies of the cell's molecular organization, especially the technologies designed for the sequencing of entire genomes, do not prove valid. These technologies cause the accumulation of vast amounts of information with no functional interpretation done. It starts to be comprehensible now that we advance at a painfully slow step to some successive stage on the path towards the answer to the essential question of biology -- What is Life? Moreover, understanding forms that we are advancing, equally slowly and painfully, along the path of progress in the field of medicine, especially so when it concerns the widely spread diseases, which are complex diseases. On this path, we often find ourselves at impasses with no way out, and although we witness the birth of a new biology -- the system biology, a synthetic one, constituting a unique alloy of many sciences, it is far from being definite that this new biology wouldalso answer this principal fundamental question and push forward the medical applications of genomics. Nonetheless, the accumulated information is very helpful and can be used for the elaboration of fundamental vetoes of biology [1] which will allow a considerable portion of the efforts in the practical, namely medical, area to be rejected as unrealizable, in the same way as the second principle of thermodynamics puts a ban on the creation of the perpetuum mobile. I am also trying to postulate that in the area of practice one should possibly think about the approaches directed to the eradication or substitution of ill cells or a damaged system's tissues, and not about the reductionistic approaches aimed at repairing the diseased organism's individual molecular components. I tried to demonstrate this statement using the example of cancer genetic surgerys. Employment of stem cells, including those modified by gene engineering, provides another instance of a holistic approach.