Saving the Phenomena in Molecular Biology

The current understanding of the articulation between the-ory construction and experimental observation is still strongly influenced by the way it is instantiated in Physics. In the last decades, however, the upsurge of molecular Biology has provided a different framework and a source of novel insight. A discipline with openly explanatory and pre-dictive goals, molecular Biology relies to a large extent on quantitative experiments. In this paper I explore the merit of the distinction between “data” and “phenomena” originally proposed by Bogen and Woodward (1988) as applied to molecular Biology, and I argue that it provides a useful tool for understanding the epistemology of modern experimental Biology.