Article ID: CBB270139233

How to choose your research organism (2020)

unapi

Despite August Krogh's famous admonition that a ‘convenient’ organism exists for every biological problem, we argue that appeals to ‘convenience’ are not sufficient to capture reasoning about organism choice. Instead, we offer a detailed analysis based on empirical data and philosophical arguments for a working set of twenty criteria that interact with each other in the highly contextualized judgements that biologists make about organism choice. We propose to think of these decisions as a form of ‘differential analysis’ where researchers weigh multiple criteria for organismal choice against each other, and often utilize multidimensional refinement processes to finalize their choices. The specific details of any one case make it difficult to draw generalizations or to abstract away from specific research situations. However, this analysis of criteria for organismal choice and how these are related in practice allows us to reflect more generally on what makes a particular organism useful or ‘good.’

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Authors & Contributors
Brown, James Robert
Wainer, Juan Manuel Garrido
Hirmas, Natalia
Nenad Miščević
Espinosa-Cristia, Juan Felipe
Harald Wiltsche
Concepts
Experiments and experimentation
Philosophy of science
Epistemology
Research methods
Thought experiments
Experimental organisms
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
Early modern
Modern
Medieval
Ancient
Places
United States
Europe
Chile
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