From Numbers to Tissues in Human Biomonitoring: Remodeling Classical Epidemiology in Switzerland

• In Event: Modeling Health Futures: Practices of Assuming, Anticipating, and Forecasting - II

Abstract

Populational cohort studies have been central to the production of knowledge in epidemiology. Following a large number of people sharing common characteristics, they use statistical models to describe the impact of lifestyle and environmental factors on health and diseases. Notwithstanding the primacy of biotechnological innovations based on mechanistic models of disease, cohort studies are still at the centre of biomedical innovation, and currently raise a fresh surge of interest within the global movement of “personalized health”. This endeavor – allegedly capitalising on the advances in genomics, postgenomics and big data analytics – promises to transform healthcare and public health by moving away from the “one size fits all” principle, in order to relate nutrition, exposure to chemicals and lifestyles to individual biomarkers of health. The expectation is to improve the understanding of common diseases in the population based on frequentist statistics, by relating these data to the marks left by the environment in biosamples.
How are health models reconfigured when epidemiological research moves from numbers to biomaterials and tissues? What kind of “person” is shaped through the relations between environment and molecular biomarkers? How does this impact the vision of future health policies? This paper will explore these questions by drawing from an ethnographic study of the implementation of a pilot human biomonitoring project in Switzerland. It will specifically focus on the relations made between the “outside” and “inside” of bodies, and the institutional, material and epistemological efforts made both to quantify and objectify their complex entanglements.

Author

• Nolwenn Bühler, STS Lab, University of Lausanne