VIRTUAL HUMAN

Virtual Human Project

Virtual Human Project

Introduction

A virtual human is a graphical representation of human beings. The main role in this is of technologies, technology has been playing a vital role in it. In the introduction, we will be discussing the virtual human project. The virtual human project is a methodological reductionism, the principal and most successful approach to the investigation of nature. With this term, we indicate "an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things" (Hanebeck & Schmidt, 2004, 44). The term and its meaning vastly debates, the most conventional interpretation are that in order to investigate a complex natural phenomenon we identify its composing parts and investigate each of them separately, pretending there are independent one from each other. Of course, this is not true in general, but in most cases, the error we commit in making this idealization is acceptable.

The problem with this approach is that too frequently methodological reductionism becomes causal reductionism, "which implies that the causes acting on the whole are simply the sum of the effects of the individual causalities of the parts". If we can understand how the parts work, the understanding on how the whole works will follow (Razzaque & Kohn et al, 2001, 44).

For example, in genetics scientists started to investigate the genes, a fundamental component of the cell, in the hope of understanding how information passes from one generation to the next (methodological reductionism). After a while, differing opinions emerged, arguing that the information encoded in the genes is the only and true "receipt of life", a position that led to the so-called gene-centred view of evolution.

Discussion

This excessive attention to the so-called upward causation (genes cause the cell behaviour, which causes the tissues behaviour, which causes the organs behaviour, which define the behaviour of our whole body) has for long shaded the strong evidences that in most living organisms upward causation coexist with mechanisms of downward causation. This term, introduced by Donald T. Campbell, in the context of systems theory, can be summarized the following statement: "the whole is to some degree constrained by the parts (upward causation), but at the same time the parts are to some degree constrained by the whole (downward causation)" (Beckhaus & Blom et al, 2007, 165).

Analysts define the Virtual Human Project as "a methodological and technological framework that, once established, will enable collaborative investigation of the human body as a single complex system". In Physiome and systems biology, it commonly called with many names. Contrastingly starting from 2005 a group of researchers started to reflect on the need of concrete tools, primarily ICT tools, to vision; such a framework of methods and tools called the Virtual Physiological Human.

Key Features of Virtual Human Project

As appropriate for these grand challenges, this initial group started a public debate, which involved hundreds of experts worldwide, and that produced a research road map. Such a framework expected to be:

Descriptive: the framework should allow observations ...