Abstract
The living world is one of complexity, the result of innumerable interactions among organisms, cells, molecules. In analyzing a problem, the biologist is constrained to focus on a fragment of reality, on a piece of the universe which he arbitrarily isolates to define certain of its parameters.In biology, any study thus begins with the choice of a “system.” On this choice depend the experimenter's freedom to maneuver, the nature of the questions he is free to ask, and even, often, the type of answer he can obtain.
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Rheinberger, HJ. Experiment and orientation: Early systems of in vitro protein synthesis. J Hist Biol 26, 443–471 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01062057
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01062057