The son of molecular biologists, Fessler calls himself "a reductionist, hypothesis-testing scientist" in a field that can be squishy with ambiguity and foggy with speculation.
Numerous prior studies have documented both dynamic changes in circulating inflammatory mediators [14], [15], but these studies have generally led to reductionist hypotheses rather than defining networks of interactions.
Of course thanks to the low-fat fad (inspired by the very same reductionist fat hypothesis), it is entirely possible to reduce your intake of saturated fat without significantly reducing your consumption of animal protein: just drink the low-fat milk and order the skinless chicken breast or the turkey bacon.
Thus, reductionist and hypothesis-driven research strategies may prove insufficient to deal with such pleiotropic activity profiles.
Here he appears to despair of understanding how secondary qualities are produced by primary ones; he appears to take the corpuscular hypothesis' reductionist claim to be true, but he despairs of our understanding how the reduction works.
Network models have the potential to avoid biases inherent in other approaches, such as the emphasis on Aβ in animal models based on the more reductionist amyloid cascade hypothesis, and allow multiple disease pathways to be represented in a single model, perhaps better relating to the processes involved in human disease.
This sequence also illustrates the open/discovery philosophy of proteomics, wherein differences between samples are detected before the protein is identified, which is diametrically opposite to hypothesis-led reductionist designs where the target of interest must be defined a priori.
GRN analysis is able to supplement the reductionist methods of traditional molecular biology, providing testable hypotheses about the synergistic actions and interactions of multiple molecules [ 59].
Here we identify the neoplastic and non-neoplastic component of lymphoma microenvironment using transcriptomics and proteomics followed by Systems Biology modeling to generates specific hypotheses and then tests these using reductionist methods.
The above described successes of reductionist approach, which are based on a priori based hypotheses, leave less room for more contextual information.
