To what extent has biotechnology affected the foundations of classical Biology?

Nowadays we eat food elaborated from plants whose resistance and strength have been increased by transgenic methods. Our children can be conceived in vitro, outside our bodies. We respond with every weapon of our natural immune system to the artificial and fictitious threat of a recombinant vaccine. Can we still define Biology as the science studying the natural characteristics and physiological functions of living beings? Considering our present lives, most of us would answer "not at all".
Many common technological strategies use natural processes and tools to create functions or artificial characters in plants, in animals and until in bacteria. Today, the procedure of gene cloning in plasmids employing restriction enzymes became a traditional method. Both tools occur naturally. Plasmids are natural structures present in some microorganisms and restriction enzymes are natural bacterial endonucleases designed to destroy any foreign nucleic acid. Thanks of this kind of techniques we have at our disposal yeast or animal cultured cells producing proteins of great medicinal importance, like somatotrophin and insulin. Biotechnological development will allow us to rise cattle able to secrete human proteins in its milk.
Those strange technological manipulations seem very artificial at first sight. Nevertheless, they fulfil conditions and they take routes that never turn off from the basic physiological principles
characteristic of any alive organism processes. Of course, a human gene carries information of a human protein. However, if a human gene must be expressed by a bacterium (that is, if that gene must to produce its corresponding protein in a foreign host cell), it will need to fulfil the essential conditions required by bacteria to recognize a DNA sequence like a functional gene. That is to say, the gene must not have any message interruption and it should be flanked by bacterial -not human- regulation regions. As much as "recombinant" could be a vaccine (even if it only keeps one protein from the bacterium to which it must emulate), it will have to follow every step any foreign microorganism do to be recognized as a strange element by our immunological cells once vaccine is inoculated. In addition, our defensive answer will be the same as if the whole bacterium had come into our body. Of course, provided such bacterium is absent, the human being will easily win the "battle".
If we let ourselves be haunted by this second, fascinating -although controversial - point of view, we will recognize that we can also answer "yes" to the initial question. We can still define Biology as the science studying the natural characteristics and physiological functions of living beings. That way, we are accepting that the scope of Biology, with its own classical rules and principles, has undergone an enormous expansion during the last decades, even taking possession of some technological, pharmacological and medical areas.
Copyright Mirta Elena Grimaldi. All rights reserved.

Biology in the context of Science

We feel that there is a struggle between two roles of Science: its traditional investigative role searching for truth and the main sense of things, and its actual function as a technological raw material, that´ s to say, a simple tool for increasing capital gain in the productive chain.
When Galileo inaugurated Science, he wished to ”read” the world as it were a book written in mathematical characters. He didn’t intend -as the Positivism did-, to calculate for predicting nor to predict for dominating. He was propelled by astonishment. But astonishment has been lost behind the wish of domination, with no more aims than those put forth by its will to power.
Heidegger said: the Being shows itself in the entity and it´s hidden behind the entity. The truth of the entity is not the truth of the Being. Does it mean that we must go through the entity if we want to reach out to the Being? Which is the truth of the Being for Science? Is the Being the Phenomenon for Science, or the Being transcends the Phenomenon? Provided the Being transcends the Phenomenon, what Science tells us about the Being? What aspects of the Being are revealed to us through the Phenomenon?
When we talk about the Phenomenon, we talk about the Appearance, we speak of the faying surface between the world and our subjectivity. Ultimately, we want to come to a truth as a revelation of the deepest essence, a revelation of what it is, not of what it seems to be.
Psychology, for instance, began like a science of the soul. Now it is defined as a science of the behaviour. The difference consists in that behaviour is visible but soul is not. Nevertheless, when we love somebody, we want to know its soul, its more intimate thoughts.
Kant taught to us that the Understanding -the instrument of Science- can just give order to the Phenomenon, it can make a sense out of it from the questions that we make about it. If we want to go to the things themselves, we are forced to escape from the scope of the Understanding. When doing it, we are outside the scope of Science. After Kant era, Philosophy has pursued on its looking for the Being outside the purview of the Understanding.
Kierkegaard said that the Understanding is unable to comprehend the infinite. Hegel looked for a Dialectic Reason including and surpassing the Understanding. Jacobi relied on faith. Schopenhauer looked for an answer in the Hinduism. Nietzsche spoke to us of the Will to Power as a motor of life whose sense is revealed in art.
There was an important exception to this romantic post-Kantian process: Goethe. Goethe tried to construct a science of life that allowed him to find the Idea manifested by the Phenomenon.
He caught sight of the Idea in the Phenomenon, in an amalgam of Sensitivity and Understanding. Under his aesthetic glance, he reunited the scopes of the knowledge that Kant had separated.
Let us suppose -he seemed to consider- that the Being shows itself in the Creation as much as it doesn’t appear in men’s mind. So what Nature would be tell us about the Being?
That way, he took up again a line inaugurated by Kepler, who wished to read God’s Mind in the planets movement rules. Goethe mean the hope of the germane idealists, he was the last thinker who was compelled to avoid the fact that the paradigm of the mechanical explanations succeeded in science. Really, the mechanical paradigm didn’t deny God existance. Rather, it imagined God as a skilful watchmaker who had set up the big planetary clock and had leave it to develop on its own, according to rigid and universal rules.
It made no sense -for this Cartesian point of view- to adore a nature that we, as men, could have just created if we were Gods; a nature that, at least, we could get to understand and to modify to our advantage.
For Goethe, as for Thales, the world was full of Gods; those Gods were called "original plant", "original animal". Nevertheless, Goethe wanted to challenge the theory of Newton about the colours, and that attitude assigned him an image of dilettante that would ruin him within the still incipient scientific community, in which it was being still discussed if - as Newton said- space and time were the sensorial devices of God.
Today, more than ever, the purpose of physics is to read God’s Mind. Einstein said "God does not play dices". Hawking, paralyzed, seated in a wheelchair, declare that the sense of his life is to reveal the thought of God through the knowledge of his work. Nevertheless, Cosmology has become a sort of science fiction, and when common people ask themselves for the contributions of the scientific development, they think about Medicine and Biology. While the cosmologists ask themselves for the origin of Universe, Biology changes our universe keeping cloned organisms and transgenic food within our reach.
Biology finds the Being in the entity? Heidegger would say that this question is no longer a problem for Biology. Biology lives in the dominion of the entity, it forgot the Being, and it even forgot that it´s possible to ask this kind of questions. However, what would happen if -following Goethe- we wondered what has been revealed to Biology through all its recent discoveries? Is there only one paradigm in Biology? Would not be a misleading image of unit the one the contemporary biologists show to us when they hide themselves behind the figure of Darwin, provided he ejected definitively all spiritual worry from this scope of knowledge?
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel and Mirta E. Grimaldi. All rights reserved.

Our proposal

We try to explain the logic behind the complex molecular mechanisms, wich are the true architects in order to create living beings and regulate their functioning.
We approach different fields of Biology, including Physiology, Ecology, the Theory of the Evolution and the hypotheses about the Origin of Life, assuming the perspective of Molecular Biology, largely the more vertiginously developing biological discipline.
Far from assuming partisanships that would only contribute to increase the actual confussion between political, religious and philosophical issues, we draw away from all that, in order to focus in the paradigmatic aspects involved in actual discussions about Evolution, Intelligent Design and Free Order in Systems at the Edge of Chaos, discussions in which Gould, Kauffman, Goodwin, Margulis, Lovelock, Behe, and many others have participated.
We propose a non-reduccionist perspective considering the Complexity of Life, and avoiding to fall into the deceit of the "badly raised analysis". This deceit claims that to divide a system in its
components it is just like to arrive to its foundations and to go back in time towards the origins of the analyzed system.
We believe that Life is an event with a hidden being, and that Biology is the construction of an endless speech trying to catch that real being which cannot be turned into language.
We are looking for realizing the movement that is drawn between that removed being and the speech that intends to illuminate it.
Copyright Daniel Omar Stchigel and Mirta Elena Grimaldi. All rights reserved.