Is systems biology a promising approach to resolve controversies in cancer research?

The history of science shows that knowledge is acquired through the competition among alternative theories. Only after these theories are thoroughly explored, its components tested and validated, opportunity for a synthesis may arise. At such a time, contradictions may be resolved and both spurious "facts" and wrong premises can be recognized and dismissed. A misguided, premature synthesis may, instead, lead to an "anything goes" attitude where any given interpretation and its opposite happily coexist, incoherence is accepted as being the inexorable consequence of dealing with complexity. In such an instance, everything is explained because if results do not fit one theory, they may fit its opposite or an ad hoc alternative one. As room is made to reconcile every improper fit, there is no chance to rule out any of them. This attitude subverts the objectives of science as described by Ayala, namely: "First, science seeks to organize knowledge in a systematic way by exhibiting patterns of relations among statements concerning facts which may not appear obviously as mutually related... It is the second distinctive characteristic of science that it strives to provide explanations of why the observed events do in fact occur. Science attempts to discover and to formulate the conditions under which the observed facts and their mutual relationships exist. Thirdly, the explanatory hypotheses provided by science must be genuinely testable, and therefore subject to the possibility of rejection [1]."An example of such a premature synthesis of opposing hypotheses in the biological sciences took place about a century ago. Jane Maienschein [2] quoted embryologist Herbert S. Jennings who when assessing the state of embryology recalled that different embryologists did similar experiments and arrived at quite different conclusions. "All the conflicting reports were correct. The situation was that of the Gilbertian comic opera chorus, 'For you are right, and I am right, and he is righ