Organicism and Reductionism in Cancer Research: Towards a Systemic Approach

In recent cancer research, strong and apparently conflicting epistemological stances have been advocated by different research teams in a mist of an ever‐growing body of knowledge ignited by ever‐more perplexing and non‐conclusive experimental facts: in the past few years, an ‘organicist’ approach investigating cancer development at the tissue level has challenged the established and so‐called ‘reductionist’ approach focusing on disentangling the genetic and molecular circuitry of carcinogenesis. This article reviews the ways in which ‘organicism’ and ‘reductionism’ are used and opposed in this context, with an aim at clarifying the debate. Methodological, epistemological and ontological implications of both approaches are discussed. We argue that the ‘organicist/reductionist’ opposition in the present case of carcinogenesis is more a matter of diverging heuristics than a claim about theoretical or ontological (ir)reducibility. As a matter of fact, except for the downward causation claim, which we question, we argue that the organicist arguments are compatible with the reductionist approach. Moreover, we speculate that both approaches, which currently focus on specific entities i.e., genes versus tissues, will need to shift their conceptual frameworks to studying complex arrays of relationships potentially ranging over several levels of entities, as is the case with ‘systems biology’.