CEFISES Seminar: Emmanuelle Maciel, “Hybridizing omics and traditional molecular biology”

Livestream https://youtu.be/wX0lKi5gCIY

Series: MolDevBio

Speaker: Emmanuelle Maciel (Université de Toulouse)

Title: “Hybridizing omics and traditional molecular biology”

Abstract

The development of high-throughput techniques aiming at studying whole classes of biomolecules, grouped under the name of “omics” have triggered change in practices in biological research. For many observers, this change has both practical and epistemic consequences. Indeed, many think that omics challenge the way of thinking in molecular biology. In particular, omics are often described as data-driven approaches yielding correlations, and distinguished from “traditional” molecular biology, which is supposed to be hypothesis-driven and to establish causation. This way of conceptualizing omics is expressed in the work of some philosophers of science, as well as in opinion articles written by biologists. However, given the limitations of analyzing opinion articles, relying on this format alone to understand how biologists conceptualize omics may be misleading. For this reason, I conducted a study based on interviews of 24 biologists and bioinformaticians to understand how they describe and analyze the changes triggered by omics in molecular biology. For molecular biologists, this change consisted mainly in the creation of new collaborations, and the incorporation in molecular biological research of practices from another epistemic community -bioinformatics. This can cause disruption of their practices, and lead to inadequate ways of using omics, especially because of the appearance of “black boxes”. In response to this, biologists and bioinformaticians develop strategies to protect certain standards in biological research. One of them is to try to fit omics in a pre-existing conception of the scientific method. Many participants propose a model of hybridization between omics and traditional molecular biology, in which omics are hypothesis-generating, and validated with wet lab experiments. Based on my own research experience in a molecular biology lab, I show another mode of hybridization between omics and traditional molecular biology, which raises further questions regarding the relevance of ascribing general epistemic roles to omics.