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Brown Bag Lectures are informal, public talks that are followed by extensive dissussions. Speakers are KLI fellows or visiting researchers who are interested in presenting their work to an interdisciplinary audience and discussing it in a wider research context. The Brown Bag Lecture series was discontinued in 2014 with the KLI moving to its new premises in Klosterneuburg. In 2014 the KLI Colloquia were established as the new lecture series.

Event Details

KLI Brown Bag
Philosophical Insights into Epigenetics
Flavio D´ABRAMO (University of Rome ´La Sapienza´)
2010-05-11 13:15 - 2010-05-11 13:15
KLI for Evolution and Cognition Research, Altenberg, Austria
Organized by KLI

Topic description:
Epigenetics could be a challenging point of view for biologists and physicians as it allows to consider different levels of explanation and to link them together in a dynamical way. Structured as a discipline more than 50 years ago, epigenetics has been rediscovered only in the last decade after the failure of some genetic hypotheses. Compared to Waddington\\\'s formulation, contemporary epigenetics - in particular when applied to medicine - is often considered in a narrow manner, and when placed in high-throughput analysis in most cases it acquires new meanings. In that \\\'narrow\\\' context the molecular level represents both the departure and the arrival point. I will show some cases from biology and medicine and after some linguistic and historical considerations I will pinpoint some philosophical issues.

 

Biographical note:
Flavio D´Abramo is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophical and Epistemological Studies at the University of Rome ´La Sapienza.´ He has been a visiting researcher in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Imperial College London. His research focuses on epigenetics, its uses in biology and medicine, and its implications for society.