Beyond Human Cell Biology to Post-Human Cell Biology
Two Volume Set

Is the potential of cell biology really so great that, as Mark Weiss once hoped, “I dream of a future in which stem cell therapies are used to treat such diseases as diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, or heart attack”? (TE 2018) This positive dream on cell biology can be contrasted with a cautious one by Ernest Istook, who suggested instead that “there are many alternatives to embryonic stem cell research, alternatives with great potential. We need to support these and oppose” embryonic stem cell research. (BQ 2018)

Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human cell biology (in relation to structure and process—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no structure without process (and vice versa), to be explained by different principles in the categories of “structure” and “process,” as well as other ones in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).

Needless to say, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that human cell biology, as a field of study, is useless, or that those diverse fields (related to human cell biology)—such as biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, geology, botany, immunology, cytochemistry, evolutionary biology, developmental biology, homeostasis, ecology, bioinformatics, bio-engineering, technology studies, religion, sociology, philosophy of biology, and so on—should be ignored. (WK 2017) Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.

Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human cell biology (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between structure and process (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the structural-processual theory of cell biology) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.

This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human cell biology (in relation to the dialectic relationship between structure and process—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.