The Construction Of Analogy Based Research Programs

When the German chemist Emil Fischer presented his lock-and-key hypothesis in 1899, his analogy to describe the molecular relationship between enzymes and substrates quickly gained vast influence and provided future generations of scientists with a tool to investigate the relation between chemical structure and biological specificity. Rebecca Mertens explains the appeal of the lock-and-key analogy by its role in model building and in the construction of long-term, cross-generational research programs. She argues that a crucial feature of these research programs, namely ascertaining the continuity of core ideas and concepts, is provided by a certain way of analogy-based modelling.

This book comprehensively reviews current and novel treatment strategies against human parasites, including protozoans and helminths, using natural products. The initial chapters summarize the conventional treatment strategies and natural-product based therapeutics against these parasites. It discusses biochemical tools and techniques for the discovery of natural product based drugs against human parasites. The book also covers the ingenious and innovative mechanisms to achieve drug resistance by the protozoan parasites and strategies to overcome the resistance. It entails mechanistic insight into the modulation of host immune responses to delay or inhibit parasite clearance and explores host-pathogen interactions that mediate immunity against subsequent parasite challenge. In turn, the volume helps in understanding the immunobiology of the parasites and tools to identify candidate vaccine antigens and novel delivery systems against the protozoan parasites. Lastly, it explores the role of advanced methods, including nanotechnology, marine bioprospecting, and microorganisms-derived biochemicals against the protozoan parasites. This book is useful for students and researchers of pharmacology, parasitology, zoology and other allied fields.​

The book is an introduction to nanomedicine informed by a philosophical reflection about the domain and recent developments. It is an overview of the field, sketching out the main areas of current investment and research. The authors present some case-studies illustrating the different areas of research (nanopharmacy, theranostics and patient monitoring) as well as reflecting on the risks that accompany it, such as unanticipated impacts on human health and environmental toxicity. This introduction to a fast-growing field in modern medical research is of great interest to researchers working in many disciplines as well as the general public. In addition to an overview of the work currently ongoing, the authors critically assess these projects from an ethical and philosophical perspective. Key Features Provides an overview of nanomedicine Employs a reflective and coherent critical evaluation of the benefits and risks of nanomedicine Written in an accessible manner intended for a wide audience Related Titles Hehenberger, M. Nanomedicine: Science, Business, and impact (ISBN 978-9-8146-1376-7). Beg, S., et al. Nanomedicine for the treatment of Disease: From Concept to Application (ISBN 978-1-7746-3443-1) Brenner, S. The Clinical Nanomedicine Handbook (ISBN 978-1-1380-7578-8)

"Esteemed historian and philosopher of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger explores the incredible diversity of scientific experimentation in his new book, which extends his ground-breaking epistemological studies of the life sciences and the experimental practices that have made them so productive. Rheinberger explores the materiality of experiment, of its objects and instruments, the construction of models, and myriad ways of making things visible. The first part of the book is devoted to the circumstances and conditions that give the process of experimentation its structural cachet and make it a device from which novelty can emerge. Then, in the second part, Rheinberger focuses on the relations that experimental systems develop among each other, specifically their characteristic temporal, spatial, and narrative dimensions. The concepts that guide his investigation emerge through accessible examples, most of which are drawn from molecular biology, including from the author's own laboratory notebooks from his years researching ribosomes. This is a tour de force by one of today's most influential theorists of scientific practice"--

The concept of analogy is of central concern to modern cognitive scientists, whereas it has been largely neglected in linguistics in the past four decades. The goal of this thought-provoking book is (1) to introduce a cognitively and linguistically viable notion of analogy; and (2) to re-establish and build on traditional linguistic analogy-based research. As a starting point, a general definition of analogy is offered that makes the distinction between analogy-as-structure and analogy-as-process. Chapter 2 deals with analogy as used in traditional linguistics. It demonstrates how phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and diachronic linguistics make use of analogy and discusses linguistic domains in which analogy does or did not work. The appendix gives a description of a computer program, which performs such instances of analogy-based syntactic analysis as have long been claimed impossible. Chapter 3 supports the ultimate (non-modular) 'unity of the mind' and discusses the existence of pervasive analogies between language and such cognitive domains as vision, music, and logic. The final chapter presents evidence for the view that the cosmology of every culture is based on analogy. At a more abstract level, the role of analogy in scientific change is scrutinized, resulting in a meta-analogy between myth and science.

The research described in this book is based on the premise that human analogy-making is an extension of our constant background process of perceiving--in other words, that analogy-making and the perception of sameness are two sides of the same coin. Foreword by Daniel Dennett While it is fashionable today to dismiss the "bad old days" of artificial intelligence and rave about emergent self-organizing systems, Robert French has created a model of human analogy-making that attempts to bridge the gap between classical top-down AI and more recent bottom-up approaches. The research described in this book is based on the premise that human analogy-making is an extension of our constant background process of perceiving--in other words, that analogy-making and the perception of sameness are two sides of the same coin. At the heart of the author's theory and computer model of analogy-making is the idea that the building-up and the manipulation of representations are inseparable aspects of mental functioning, in contrast to traditional AI models of high-level cognitive processes, which have almost always depended on a clean separation. A computer program called Tabletop forms analogies in a microdomain consisting of everyday objects on a table set for a meal. The theory and the program rely on the idea that myriad stochastic choices made on the microlevel can add up to statistical robustness on a macrolevel. To illustrate this, French includes the results of thousands of runs of his program on several dozen interrelated analogy problems in the Tabletop microworld. French's work is exciting not only because it reveals analogy-making to be an extension of our complex and subtle ability to perceive sameness but also because it offers a computational model of mechanisms underlying these processes. This model makes significant strides in putting into practice microlevel stochastic processing, distributed processing, simulated parallelism, and the integration of representation-building and representation-processing. A Bradford Book