The philosophy and ethics team are exploring the implications of the Indiana Center for Regenerative Medicine and Engineering’s post-mortem research findings and are developing approaches in the philosophy of biology that builds on these findings.

Project investigators see this exploration as a powerful opportunity to advance regenerative medicine and philosophical understanding, by raising essential metaphysical questions that have moral implications, including three main issues:

• The nature of death itself, whether it’s the death of a cell, the damage of tissue or the collapse of an organ, or the malfunction of the whole organism. Researchers will consider whether non-traumatic death of an organism is a discrete event or a protracted process as well as help clarify the difference between planned and unplanned cell death–apoptosis versus necrosis.
• The unity of organisms and the interplay of ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ causal processes with organisms. Researchers will consider whether the discovery that organisms relinquish control over the genetic capacities of adult cells as slow death approaches disconfirms the philosophical perspective of hylomorphism, according to which components of living systems ‘lose their identity,’ when taken up into the organism.
• Emergence, the thesis that the properties and behavior of certain composed systems (including biological humans) do not reduce to the properties and interrelated behavior of their parts. Investigators will consider whether the post-mortem research findings lend support to the anti-emergentist “colony of cells” perspective on organisms (human included), either in general or as a transitional organismal phase as slow death is anticipated.

We hypothesize that in their effort to mount survival at the organ/tissue level, certain cells in that tissue that are already senesced, diseased or injured must be eliminated, making way for the healthier component of the tissue to survive.

Some theoretically-minded biologists and philosophers of biology see organisms as an arbitrary entity.

Genes affect the ability to reproduce by impacting an area that extends beyond the boundaries of the body. Consider the concept of the “extended phenotype.”