A cell may be materially contained within, functionally dependent on and developmentally constrained by an organism without having its biological identity exhausted by it. This article introduces basal cellular autonomy and frames cancer as a possible inter-scalar dissociation of biological coherence.
A mechanistically constrained model of how organism-level states can alter cellular fate: the cell does not receive the meaning of an event, but a changed local world that may become durable biological history.
A luminous living cell integrated into a multicellular network while retaining its own boundary and internal organisation.