Federico BoemRuhr-Universität Bochum | RUB · Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Research
Federico Boem
Doctor of Philosophy
Postdoc in Philosophy of Science at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, (DE)
About
35
Publications
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
November 2019 - November 2020
November 2018 - March 2019
April 2018 - October 2018
Education
January 2012 - October 2015
September 2010 - September 2011
September 2002 - January 2009
Publications
Publications (35)
In this manuscript, we explore the potential therapeutic use of helminths. After analyzing helminths’ role in connection with human health from the perspective of their symbiotic and evolutionary relationship, we critically examine some studies on their therapeutic applications. In doing so, we focus on some prominent mechanisms of action and poten...
Material science publications are the outcome of research, but they can contain errors. We advocate for post publication peer review as a way to collectively improve self-correction of science.
We argue that microbiome research should be more reflective on the methods that it relies on to build its datasets due to the danger of facing a methodological problem which we call “epistemic misalignment.” An epistemic misalignment occurs when the method used to answer specific scientific questions does not track justified answers, due to the mat...
Scientific and philosophical accounts of cognition and perception have traditionally focused on the brain and external sense organs. The extended view of embodied cognition suggests including other parts of the body in these processes. However, one organ has often been overlooked: the gut. Frequently conceptualized as merely a tube for digesting fo...
The study of the interactions between the neuroendocrine and immune systems is a highly interdisciplinary research endeavor, in which the boundaries between the systems being studied become blurred. We address a common scientific perspective in dealing with intertwined complex systems, namely the conceptual approach in science that treats each syst...
A general view in philosophy of science states that the appropriateness of an object to act as a surrogate depends on the user’s decision to utilize it as such. This paper challenges this claim by examining the role of surrogative reasoning in high-throughput sequencing technologies (technology-driven surrogates) as they are used in contemporary mi...
The tumor microenvironment (TME) represents a complex and dynamic entity, able to affect oncogenesis, tumor cells’ preservation, local invasion, and metastatic propagation of gastrointestinal cancers. The TME is able to change according to malignancy type, but common characteristics include immune cells, blood vessels, stromal cells, and extracellu...
Abstract
Individuating the logic of scientific discovery appears a hopeless enterprise. Less hopeless is trying to figure out a logical way to model the epistemic attitude distinguishing the practice of scientists. In this paper, we claim that classical logic cannot play such a descriptive role. We propose, instead, one of the three-valued logics...
Nell’ambito delle associazioni simbiotiche ha acquisito credito crescente la cosiddetta prospettiva “olobiontica”, secondo cui animali e piante non dovrebbero più essere considerati entità autonome, con confini chiaramente delimitati, ma li si dovrebbe vedere come unità funzionali che consistono di reti inter-relazionali tra specie diverse. In ques...
Making public policy choices (especially on health issues) based on available scientific evidence is an ideal condition for any policy making. However, the mechanisms governing these scenarios are complex, non-linear, and, alongside the medical-health and epidemiological issues, involve socio-economic, political, communicative, informational, ethic...
The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a medical and epidemiological problem. In fact, its impact concerns numerous aspects of human life (such as social and the political-economic dimension). This review aims at highlighting some crucial and neglected aspects of the pandemic in order to include them into a more general framework for the understanding o...
In the understanding and prediction of a pandemic phenomenon, epidemiology is obviously the dedicated discipline. However, epidemiological models look at what we might call the proximate causes of the pandemic. On the other hand, the ultimate causes, those of an ecological, evolutionary, and socioeconomic nature, are often too simplified or reduced...
Cancer is a primary cause of death globally. Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy were the most common types of cancer treatment available for a long time but not resolutive. To date, significant advancements in cancer immunotherapy has become of huge interest because of its promise for revolutionizing tumor therapy, with reduced risk of adverse...
According to a shared functionalist view in philosophy of mind, a cognitive system, and cognitive function thereof, is based on the components of the organism it is realized by which, indeed, play a causal role in regulating our cognitive processes. This led philosophers to suggest also that, thus, cognition could be seen as an extended process, wh...
The experimental practice in contemporary molecular biology oscillates between the creativity of the researcher in tinkering with the experimental system, and the necessity of standardization of methods of inquiry. Experimental procedures, when standardized in lab protocols, might definitely be seen as actual recipes. Considering these protocols as...
How does microbiota research impact our understanding of biological individuality? We summarize the interdisciplinary summer school on “Microbiota, symbiosis and individuality: conceptual and philosophical issues” (July 2019), which was supported by a European Research Council starting grant project “Immunity, DEvelopment, and the Microbiota” (IDEM...
In this study we analyze a recent controversy within the biomedical world, concerning the evaluation of safety of certain vaccines. This specific struggle took place among experts: the Danish epidemiologist Peter Gøtzsche on one side and a respected scientific institution, the Cochrane, on the other. However, given its relevance, the consequences o...
Cancer immunotherapy refers to a set of approaches aiming at enhancing the immune system to fight cancer growth and spread. This variety of therapeutic approaches, especially those inhibiting immune checkpoints, have shown very promising results. Nevertheless, patients may respond differently to treatments and the efficacy of immunotherapy seems to...
Evidence establishes that chronic inflammation and autoimmunity are associated with cancer development and patients with a primary malignancy may develop autoimmune-like diseases. Despite immune dysregulation is a common feature of both cancer and autoimmune diseases, precise mechanisms underlying this susceptibility are not clarified and different...
Despite the lack of precise mechanisms of action, a growing number of studies suggests that gut microbiota is involved in a great number of physiological functions of the human organism. In fact, the composition and the relations of intestinal microbial populations play a role, either directly or indirectly, to both the onset and development of var...
The worldwide epidemic of obesity has become an important public health issue, with serious psychological and social consequences. Obesity is a multifactorial disorder in which various elements (genetic, host, and environment), play a definite role, even if none of them satisfactorily explains its etiology. A number of neurological comorbidities, s...
Abstract: In recent years, the human microbiota has gained increasing relevance both in research and clinical fields. Increasing studies seem to suggest the centrality of the microbiota and its composition both in the development and maintenance of what we call “health” and in generating and/or favoring (those cases in which the microbiota’s comple...
In the last decade, robustness has been extensively mentioned and discussed in biology as well as in the philosophy of the life sciences. Nevertheless, from both fields, someone has affirmed that this debate has resulted in more semantic confusion than in semantic clearness. Starting from this claim, we wish to offer a sort of prima facie map of th...
We claim that in contemporary studies in molecular biology and biomedicine, the nature of ‘manipulation’ and ‘intervention’ has changed. Traditionally, molecular biology and molecular studies in medicine are considered experimental sciences, whereas experiments take the form of material manipulation and intervention. On the contrary “big science” p...
The complex nature of human diseases, the significant differences between individuals, their own specificity and the inevitable variability in how a treatment is administered make pharmacological research extremely difficult. Due to the inability to completely predict how a product will affect individual patients, it’s not unusual for a drug to sho...
Biomedical ontologies are considered a serious innovation for biomedical research and clinical practice. They promise to integrate information coming from different biological databases thus creating a common ground for the representation of knowledge in all the life sciences. Such a tool has potentially many implications for both basic biomedical...
In the last few years, the lack of a unitary notion of gene across biological sciences has troubled the philosophy of biology community. However, the debate on this concept has remained largely historical or focused on particular cases presented by the scientific empirical advancements. Moreover, in the literature there are no explicit and reasonab...
In its last round of publications in September 2012, the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements (ENCODE) assigned a biochemical function to most of the human genome, which was taken up by the media as meaning the end of ‘Junk DNA’. This provoked a heated reaction from evolutionary biologists, who among other things claimed that ENCODE adopted a wrong and muc...
The aim of the following report is to outline the content of the lectures given during the First IAOA Interdisciplinary Summer School on Ontological Analysis (July 16-20 2012, Trento, Italy). The report emphasizes some of the hot topics or open questions discussed during the sessions, while reflecting a variety of perspectives on the goals of ontol...