Galen (c.130 –
c.210 AD) was a Greek physician that lived in Rome and influenced occidental
medicine for fifteen centuries. Many of
his knowledge were based on comparative anatomy. In ancient Rome it was forbidden
to do autopsy (in pagan Rome). So, it was necessary to study anatomy of animals
and compare it to humans.
In the 16th
century the Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) rebelled against the
galenic anatomy adopted in the University of Paris and went to the University
of Padua, where he could learn about human autopsy. So, he became the founder
of modern anatomy based on the direct study of the human body.
It is interesting
that sometime after that, in the 17th century, the study of
physiology started based on vivisection of Descartes and empiric science of
Francis Bacon, both using animals and comparing to humans; maybe we could name
it, in a certain way, a kind of “galenic science”.
Recently, in
The New York Times it was published an article about a paper of Dr. H. Shaw Warren
and collaborators in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That paper was about the misleading of research based on mouse model for at least three pathologic conditions: sepsis,
burn and trauma. They found that the immune response of the mouse is very
different of that response in humans. So, the response to the same drug is not
the same in mouse and in humans. The genomic knowledge could explain that
difference.
In the last decades new scientific and clinic knowledge brought new light to biologic mechanism of sepsis.
It does not
mean that any animal model is not anymore useful. But it is necessary
understand better the complexity of the human body itself in its singularity, or even comparing to
animals.
So, notions
of Complexity, that was proposed first in the field of Biology in the beginning
of the 20th century, are now again necessary to understand
peculiarities in a “transdisciplinary” approach of knowledge in several fields of science.
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