Page 126 - Book of Abstracts

5 International Scientific Online Conference DOI: https://doi.org/10.15414/2021.9788055224015

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NEW, DIGITAL BIOLOGY OF THE 21 CENTURY: THROUGH DIGITALIZATION TO
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VIRTUALIZATION
Kharlampy Tiras
Pushchino State Institute of Natural Sciences, Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Biophysics,
Pushchino, Russian Federation; E-mail.: tiras1950@yandex.ru
New, digital biology of the 21 century: through digitalization to virtualization. A living
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organism has always occupied a central place in biology, which explains the special interest of
biology and biologists in this level of organization of living things. At the same time, there is an
objective complexity of the study of a living being. In order to study it, it must be found in nature
or diluted in a clinic or greenhouse, and then various traumatic or fixing procedures must be
used to study its morphology, physiology, or biochemistry. Such procedures most often lead to
the death of the investigated object, that is, its transition from a living to a nonliving state. As a
result of all these manipulations, the living turns into inanimate, it is necessary to study not the
state of a living object, as such, but a fixed artifact, if we are talking about its morphology, or a
gradually dying object when a routine physiological study is carried out.
The opposite of reduction in biology is the naturalistic approach when a living object is
studied in its native, undamaged state. This approach dominated biology in the 17–18 centuries,
but then, in the 19–20 centuries, the experimental (reduction) approach completely dominated
in biology, the result of which was a description of a not quite living or not at all living object. It
is fair to call such biology martyrology, as the science of inanimate nature. A good metaphor for
old biology is the classic biological museum with thousands of stuffed animals, formalin
artifacts, and dry herbarium leaves.
The methodological impasse in the study of living matter began to be overcome during
the technological revolution at the turn of the 20 and 21 centuries when the digital
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technology of remote (non-invasive) study of living objects came to biology. The advent of
digital video microscopy, two- and three-dimensional scanners, and various tomography
systems made it possible to study the surface, as well as the internal structure and functions of
undamaged living objects.
Digital technologies must be implemented precisely at the level of the whole organism,
when information is obtained through external (non-invasive) observation, which links the
practice (ethics) of modern digital technological reality with the times of the founding fathers
of modern biology: Linnaeus, Goethe, and the Humboldt brothers. The rational aspect of this
approach consisted in adhering to universal scientific ethics: obtaining accurate information
about the structure of a living object without external influence on it.
As the digital revolution develops, we are witnessing the revival of the ethics of naturalism
in its new format – as a synthesis of (non-invasive) observation and experiment, which creates
the preconditions for the development of a new (true) biology, the biology of a living organism.
This is a special observation experiment when the study of the structure and function of a living
thing is transferred from the living object itself to its electronic image (avatar).
At the same time, the border between the naturalist and the experimental naturalist is
erased – a new, virtual reality appears, in which the naturalist conducts his "experiments". With
further digitalization, biology will inevitably switch to working with files, objects of virtual
reality. Biological research will consist of the application of different algorithms for analyzing
the same image to obtain more and more information about the electronic object under study.
The digitalization of biology leads it to more and more complete virtualization, which will be
the main trend of its development in the 21 century.
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Keywords: digital biology, naturalistic ethics, digitalization, virtualization.

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5 International Scientific Conference Agrobiodiversity for Improving the Nutrition, Health, Quality of Life and |125
Spiritual Human Development
November 3 2021
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