Éthique du vivant et épistémologie de la biologie

This work examined the consequences of the use of reduction as prevailing strategy of analysis in biological research. It questioned the resulting representations of living and their impact on the biological field and beyond. Such representations contribute to configure or to influence conceptions of living promoted by education, culture or mass medium. They get an ethical dimension because they could influence clinical practices, decisions of health authorities, selection of research priorities, training of young researchers, and, more generally, management of living. The booming of postgenomic methods to approach transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, etc., as well as the growing interest in systems biology are likely expressing the need of escaping from reduction limits to reach more global views of the living mechanisms. Present emphasis on emergence as an essential feature of living, as well as on nonlinearity of biological processes are apparently better adapted to complexity, historic and evolving features of living. New approaches and analytical strategies should produce representations of living and health more compatible with such conceptions and their bioethical involvements. Ethics of living interacts thus with the epistemologies of biology: it meets up with ethics of biological research and consubstantiates with it.