The Jacques Loeb Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel, supports advanced research on a variety of topics related to the life sciences and serves as an interdisciplinary forum for scientists, historians and philosophers of science.  

 

The Centre bases its activities on the idea that science cannot be fully comprehended without both a historical and a philosophical perspective. History provides the details of scientific developments while philosophy leads to a deeper understanding of scientific progress and pitfalls. 

The Centre is named after German-American physiologist Jacques Loeb (1859-1924), legendary experimentalist and seminal thinker in the history of biology. His passionate promotion of biology as an exact experimental science, his “mechanistic” outlook on research and his opposition to the vitalistic concepts prevalent around 1900 impacted greatly on the development of the life sciences. 

​

Just a few of the topics investigated by the Centre are:

​

• The history of ideas and practices in modern biology, particularly molecular biology of complex systems, genomics and molecular systems biology, microbiology, cell biology, developmental biology and synthetic biology
   

• The causal analysis of scientific change and scientific progress, in which theories of scientific advance are confronted with notions of scientific development
   

• The nature of the connections between bio-scientists and industry

 

To learn more about the Jacques Loeb Centre, please visit:

http://in.bgu.ac.il/en/loeb/Pages/default.aspx

​