The Biological Cell in Spectacle

Abstract

It seems that, for some hot topics, the today means aiming to monitor and to survey the published literature in the respective fields are no longer able to accomplish their task. One of these topics is the biological cell.

Obviously, for biology the aim to investigate its functioning is for long time a basic task. It happens, however, that beginning with the middle of the past century, a lot of other disciplines became interested in the problems raised by the biological cell: physics, linguistics, mathematics, computer science, semiotics, philosophy, sociology are only some of them. Having the opportunity to attend some of their meetings and to read some of the respective papers, I was struck by the fact that, despite their different profile, they all start with statements like this: “Our aim is to understand the functioning of the biological cell”. But in their next steps you hardly recognize that they have a common aim. Each of them adopts a specific terminology, a specific jargon, and has specific bibliographic references; moreover, to a large extent, each of them has its specific journals. Under these conditions, you expect that these different directions of research need to interact, but these expectations are not satisfied. They almost ignore each other.

It is scandalous! It is incredible that this may happen! It is a symptom of a grave disease of human communication. I call it a spectacle, but it is rather a spectacle belonging to the absurd; maybe we should describe it as a mixture of absurd and schizophrenia.

In the following, I will sketch some of these directions of research.