EXTERNAL SEMINAR - Emmanuelle Maciel

Emmanuelle Maciel will give a short external seminar, hosted by Thomas Lecuit (IBDM).

Location: Hexagone Auditorium
Date: 25.11.2025
Time: 4 PM

Title: Epistemic roles of omics in molecular biology “small labs”: beyond the “data-driven/hypothesis-driven” dichotomy.

Abstract:

Omics developed in all fields of molecular biology at the turn of the century, giving rise to extensive debates both among biologists and philosophers of science. The analysis of a corpus of opinion articles published by biologists reveals an association between traditional biology and hypothesis-driven reasoning, on the one hand, and omics-based biology and data-driven reasoning, on the other. The aim of this presentation is to question this distinction, from the angle of philosophy of biology. I focus on the case of “small labs” (Knorr-Cetina 1991), which is the typical organization of molecular biology laboratories, as opposed to large-scale projects.

I performed an ethnographic study to understand thoroughly the way molecular biologists and bioinformaticians conceptualize omics. Participants generally fostered a model of complementarity between omics and wet lab experimentation, the Omic Candidate Approach. I argue that this model only partially applies to practices in molecular biology, by presenting a case study of the use of omics to study DNA double-strand breaks in relation to chromatin conformation, in which omics are used in a hypothesis-driven manner.