Between Soup and Substance: Re-working the Environment in a Post-Genomic Age

• In Event: 346 - Regular Session. Sociology of Science 1

Abstract

Drawing data from a nation-wide qualitative study of federally funded gene-environment interaction (GEI) research in the U.S., this paper examines shifting meanings of the environment in a post-genomic landscape. We found that while GEI researchers acknowledged the interplay of environments and genes in defining risk for complex disease, they encountered several challenges in producing credible knowledge of such environmental effects and in integrating this information with genomics. Researchers’ own thinking demonstrated a complex, immersive and contextual vision of the environment as a molecular and social soup, in which human bodies register the effects of social life at the molecular level through a socially responsive body. However, in evoking this vision and in attempting to measure the environment and detect the effects of social contexts and environments in the body, researchers often struggled to capture this kind complexity, and subsequently more often sought to transform the environment into a dose. In doing so, we argue, they conflate the credible substantiation of scientific and political claims about the effects the environment with the detection of a ‘dose’ of specific molecular substances. These dynamics continue to re-define the boundaries between bodies and environments and are re-shaping credible answers to questions about how inequality ‘gets under the skin’.

Authors

• Katherine Weatherford Darling, University of California-San Francisco

• Janet K. Shim, University of California-San Francisco