In recent years debate has spurred over the potential conflict between two emerging paradigms in biomedicine: Personalized Medicine (PM) and Person-Centered Medicine (PCM). Though both P-Med and PCM aim at tailoring therapies to the individual level, they do so by resorting to different conceptual frameworks and techniques.

Bioprospecting – the collection, screening and scientific use of plant genetic information to improve food crops and for the development of pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and other consumer goods – is testimony to the ever-increasing value of biodiversity in the global economy. But in what does the challenge of a global genetic resource management consist and why should scientists and the wider public care about its social implications?

The expressions “biological replicate” and “technical replicate” are ubiquitous in biology, but they are surprisingly recent. At first glance, the adjectives suggest that one can understand these notions in terms of a distinction between biological variation and technological variations. This however becomes problematic as soon as biological systems are used as instruments.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has become an important technique in cognitive neuroscience. An MRI scanner can acquire low-definition pictures of the human brain in only 2s, and this is repeatedly done for the whole duration of a certain cognitive task, e.g. recognizing the emotions expressed by human faces that are shown on a screen.

There is no questioning that pharmacology has played an important part in the great advances of medical science in the last century. Dramatically effective and relatively cheap drugs, such as aspirin or antibiotics, have marked for many once very severe or even lethal diseases a conversion to treatable conditions. Such drugs are the so-called "blockbusters" and they have represented the pillars of pharmaceutical industry so far.