Past Workshops and Events

The symposium will discuss some prevalent dangers for science and technology in democratic countries. Science is affected by many societal factors, including the tendency for market principles to constrain academic values and render science a tool for application, marginalizing long-term oriented basic research. We will not discuss these factors here, but we focus on the decline of standards in education in many countries for various reasons, and on the risks to securing excellence in science through the principle of diversity and equity imposed by public opinion, administration, and mass media particularly in the United States but also in other countries.

While equal treatment and t​he system of merit based on individual achievements regardless of race, gender, and class have been longstanding guiding principles to reduce injustice and at the same time maintain high standards in science, 'diversity and equity' suggests or even mandates equality in terms of absolute numbers of people in specific subgroups. The resulting political pressure on individuals and institutions is not expected to lead to the same dire consequences as in authoritarian countries. However, according to many commentators, the damage done to careers and the downgrading of scientific standards will have serious long-term repercussions not only for individuals but for science as a whole. 

In order to provide a historical perspective, the symposium also reviews the impact of the implementation of racial principles into academia through anti-Jewish measures in Nazi Germany and selected cases of political interference with science in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. The symposium examines examples from many disciplines and wider analyses of ideologically motivated interference with teaching and publishing today. It will discuss how placing group identity, in contrast to the maxim of equality of opportunity regardless of group membership, at the center of assessments, and the suppression of academic freedom have begun to endanger standards in science, mathematic, technology, and engineering in the US and other Western countries.

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​Dedicated to Eric Davidson, 1937- 2015

Constancy and predictability are, with few exceptions, fundamental characteristics of embryonic development, as Eric Davidson has pointed out many times: Within each species the outcome of development is extremely reproducible; largely independent of the environment, animals beget similar offspring. In the words of Benny Shilo, "through a continuum of cell divisions and migrations, in a constantly changing environment, the final shape of the embryo is generated each time an organism is formed with amazing precision and reproducibility." In his lifework, Davidson explored the importance of developmental gene regulatory networks (GRNs) to generating such robust developmental outcomes. GRNs consist of regulatory genes and signaling pathways that execute a cascade of molecular mechanisms to transform an egg cell into a complex organism, plus the sequences that control the expression of each of these genes. Davidson’s model of development through GRNs also has implications for evolution: The most central genetic circuits controlling development, the “kernels” of the hierarchical GRNs, are so constrained that their variations are rare, a hypothesis that explains the remarkable degree of constancy in evolution, i.e. the phenotypic stability of animal body plans that has persisted at least since the early Cambrian period 520 million years ago. According to this model, such changes in the "kernels" that lead to viable organisms, can result in dramatic changes in developmental processes that could under certain conditions lead to the generation of new body plans in evolution.​

The fruitfulness of Davidson's model of developmental GRNs has been widely acknowledged by many biological scientists. However, there are phenomena that cannot be explained by this model, and some of its key concepts have been challenged and amended in recent years.

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According to a widespread perception, scientific activity today is facing a so-called “replication crisis”. A large number of seemingly groundbreaking findings published in leading scientific journals, such as Nature and Science, have turned out to be invalid or highly questionable, and in recent years, many papers have been retracted. It is estimated that more than half of the experimental results (Ioannidis 2005) - some claim the percentage is over 70% - published in journals of medicine, biology, economics, clinical medicine, and other fields are inflated and difficult to replicate.

This development comes at a time when even well-established scientific facts, regarding, for instance, man-made global warming or vaccination, are being questioned for political reasons. The ongoing controversy about the reproducibility of scientific results threatens to undermine the authority of science. The extent and severity of the “replication crisis” are being continuously discussed in the literature. It seems, however, that these discussions, rather than revealing the existence of a fatal flaw at the heart of modern scientific practice, show that our general understanding of the complexities concerning the replication and reproducibility of experimental findings and experimental methods is rather limited. The failure to replicate can be a result of scientific fraud, insufficient scientific methods, failure to adhere to good standards of research or the consequence of flawed publishing practices. The different causes of irreproducibility such as poor use of statistics, selective reporting, pressure to publish, flawed peerreview practices, poorly described methods, incompletely reported data, financial and other interests, biased reasoning and prejudices, outright scientific fraud – each suggest different reforms. Addressing the problems of replication and their causes is crucial for suggesting appropriate reforms.

Our international and interdisciplinary workshop brings together scientists, historians,and philosophers to reflect on the current controversies about the replication of scientific research. The workshop is organized by the Jacques Loeb Centre for History and Philosophy of, and Critical Dialogues in, the Life Sciences.

The workshop took place March 14, 2022 at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel.

The overall goal was to understand in more detail the nature of experimental replication and its failures, both in the traditional Baconian sense and in the sense of statistical testing, which has recently become prevalent. The workshop also addressed the following questions:

1. Does the current failure to replicate scientific findings represent a crisis?
2. To what extent are the recent failures to replicate due to the mindless, mechanical use of statistical testing? (Gigerenzer 2018)
3. Should the failure of replication be regarded as part of scientific advance that is usually self-corrected in science?
4. What does it mean to replicate an experimental procedure and an experimental result?
5. What is the epistemic importance of replication?
6. How does replication compare with other methodological strategies that scientists use to confirm and validate their experimental procedures and results?
7. How do the answers to these questions differ across disciplines and how have they changed over time?​

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'Big data' technology has been fruitfully integrated into causal-mechanistic research at a systems level, but has also led to data-driven research that does not reach beyond correlation and has been used to support a new "philosophy" that runs counter to conventional epistemologies. While it is true that developments in computer science and engineering have indeed pushed pattern recognition in many fields of science far beyond the ability of humans, science is not confined to pattern recognition. Biology asks causal questions, e.g. about genomic causality of development, and looks for mechanisms needed to understand how intervention, perturbation (or disease) affect a system.

The workshop addressed the topic from the perspectives of different scientific as well as humanistic specialties. It aims at generating an intellectual discussion about the changing methodology and its implication for scientific knowledge in 21st century informational biology.

Speakers:​

• George Brownlee - University of Oxford, UK
• Ami Citri - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
• Ute Deichmann - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
• Ally Eran - Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel
• Douglas Erwin - Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, USA
• Denis Forest - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, France
• Dan Graur - University of Houston, USA
• Jeremy Gunawardena - Harvard University, USA
• Michael Hiller - Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, Germany
• Shalev Itzkovitz - Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
• Ron Milo - Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
• Ellen Rothenberg - California Institute of Technology, USA
• Stanislav Shvartsman - Princeton University, USA​​
• Robert A. Weinberg - Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, USA

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Interdisciplinary workshop organized by the Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences and The National Institute for Biotechnology in the Negev (NIBN).

This workshop illuminated the idea, the current developments, and caveats of what is called "personalized medicine" or "precision medicine". Focusing on cancer research, we highlighted the motivation for, and historical development of, personalized medicine. We compared its diagnosis and treatment methodology with that of experiment-based molecular medicine, and discussed its limitations including, e.g. the extremely high costs for a small group of patients and the prevalence of multi-gene diseases and drug interactions.

Among the topics:

• From molecular medicine to personalized medicine
• The scientific rationale and epistemology behind the concept
• Cases of success: diagnosis and treatment of single gene diseases
• Challenges to the concept through the existence of multiple mutations, and the requirement for multimodality treatments (drug-drug interactions)
• Economic dimensions of cancer treatment and limitations of personalized medicine due to extremely high costs applied to a small group of patients
• Ethics of personalized medicine, e.g. storage of personal data

Videos:

• Watch on YouTube >>
• Moshe Elkabets, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel​ Can we do a better genomic-driven precision medicine in oncology? >>
• Frank Lyko, Deutsches Krebsforschungszentru​m (German Cancer Research Center), Germany ​Epigenetic approaches in personalized medicine and precision oncology >>
• Eva Winkler, University of Heidelberg, Germany ​Ethical aspects and policy tensions in personalized medicine >>
• Aaron Ciechanover, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel The revolution of personalized medicine: Are we going to cure all diseases and at what price?​ >>
• Hans Lehrach, Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Germany Virtualized drug development for (truly) personalized drug therapy >>
• Michal Lotem, Hadassah Medical Center, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel​ The Limitless Nature of Cancer Immunotherapy >>