This collective monograph aims at contributing to an improved understanding of the epistemic presumptions, sociocultural implications and historically backgrounds of the newly emerging and currently expanding approach of systems biology. In doing so, it offers empirically grounded, valuable and reflexive information about a paradigmatic shift in the biosciences for a wide range of scientists working in the interdisciplinary areas of systems biology, synthetic biology, molecular biology, biology, the philosophy of science, the sociology of science and scientific knowledge, science and technology studies, technology assessment and the like. The authors of this monograph share the theoretical methodological premise that science is a culturally and socially embedded practice which characterizes our culture as a scientific one and at the same time draws its innovative potential from its sociocultural context. This dialectic relationship lies at the heart of the current development of systems biology which is conceived as a so-called successor of '-omics' research and triggered by high-throughput information technologies. At the same time a need for a holistic conceptualization of complex biological processes emerges.

Understanding systems biology: a place for social science analysis.- Basic concepts of systems biology as seen through systems bioliogist's eyes: metaphorical imagination and epistemic presuppositions.- Systems oriented approaches in biology: system biologist's narratives of present, past and future.- Systems biology, information technology and cancer research.- Science policy of systems biology.- Systems biology goes public: representations in German and Austrian print media.- Back into future: the systems biology to come. ¿