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In Praise of Organismal Biology

Gadagkar, R. (2009) In Praise of Organismal Biology. [Book Chapter]

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Abstract

I have been asked to describe my efforts in the past 25 years or so, to remain at the cutting edge of international scientific research. I do so with a certain degree of hesitation and at the risk of sounding pompous. I am a biologist and biology today is an incredibly rich and complex discipline. Hence biology can be practiced in many different ways. An additional reason for this is that life processes are organized in many different hierarchical levels. At one level you have ecosystems, forests, populations and then the individual organism, which can be studied in its own right. At the other extreme, if you go deep inside an individual, you have cells, tissues, organs, organelles and finally, molecules. The manner of doing biology at these different levels of organization can be so different that they can be mutually incompatible and often mutually incomprehensible. While it is obvious that studying life processes at all possible levels of organization is necessary and interesting, this needs different classes of biologists trained in rather different methodologies, and driven by quite different philosophical orientations. All this makes it almost impossible to maintain a reasonable balance between the different kinds of biology. This is true at the national and even international level, not to speak of the impossibility of maintaining a balance within an institution or department of biology.

Item Type: Book Chapter
Publisher: Indian National Science Academy
Keywords: Organismal biology, Sub-organismal biology, Biology
Department/Centre: Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences
Date Deposited: 22 Mar 2021 11:47
Last Modified: 22 Mar 2021 11:47
URI: http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/68306

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