Recent studies demonstrating epigenetic and developmental sensitivity to early environments, as exemplified by fields like the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and environmental epigenetics, are bringing new data and models to bear on debates about race, genetics, and society. Here, we first survey the historical prominence of models of environmental determinism in early formulations of racial thinking to illustrate how notions of direct environmental effects on bodies have been used to naturalize racial hierarchy and inequalities in the past. (...) Next, we conduct a scoping review of postgenomic work in environmental epigenetics and DOHaD that looks at the role of race/ethnicity in human health (2000–2021). Although there is substantial heterogeneity in how race is conceptualized and interpreted across studies, we observe practices that may unwittingly encourage typological thinking, including: using DNA methylation as a novel marker of racial classification; neglect of variation and reversibility within supposedly homogenous racial groups; and a tendency to label and reify whole groups as pathologized or impaired. Even in the very different politico-economic and epistemic context of contemporary postgenomic science, these trends echo deeply held beliefs in Western thinking which claimed that different environments shape different bodies and then used this logic to argue for essential differences between Europeans and non-Europeans. We conclude with a series of suggestions on interpreting and reporting findings in these fields that we feel will help researchers harness this work to benefit disadvantaged groups while avoiding the inadvertent dissemination of new and old forms of stigma or prejudice. (shrink)

Emphatic claims of a “microbiome revolution” aside, the study of the gut microbiota and its role in organismal development and evolution is a central feature of so-called postgenomics; namely, a conceptual and/or practical turn in contemporary life sciences, which departs from genetic determinism and reductionism to explore holism, emergentism and complexity in biological knowledge-production. This paper analyses the making of postgenomic knowledge about developmental symbiosis in Drosophila melanogaster by a specific group of microbiome scientists. Drawing from both practical philosophy of (...) science and Science and Technology Studies, the paper documents epistemological questions of artefactuality and representativeness of model organisms as they emerge in the day-to-day labour producing and being produced by the “microbiome revolution." Specifically, the paper builds on all the written and editorial exchanges involved in the troubled publication of a research paper studying the symbiotic role of the microbiota in the flies’ development. These written materials permit us to delimit the network of justifications, evidence, standards of knowledge-production, trust in the tools and research designs that make up the conditions of possibility of a postgenomic fact. More than reframing the organism as a radically novel multiplicity of reactive genomes, we conclude, doing postgenomic research on the microbiota and symbiosis means producing a story that deviates from the scripts embedded into the sociotechnical experimental systems of post-Human Genome Project life sciences. (shrink)

Part of the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies is the premise that the children born from in vitro fertilization are no different from their counterparts conceived spontaneously. However, interest in peri-conception health and new epigenetic understandings of biological plasticity has led to some questioning the presumed irrelevance of conception in vitro, and when doing so, describing IVF children as “apparently healthy.” Taking “apparently” and “healthy” seriously, this article explores how modes of attention—ways of naming and framing embryo potentiality—shape understandings of (...) health and normality. I contend that understanding the politics of potentiality, and how they may emerge in a postgenomic age, requires an unpacking of various modes of attention and framing. Ethnographic findings from South Africa’s fertility clinics and emerging literature on epigenetic variation in IVF conception demonstrate how, under a genetic mode of attention, IVF clinics views “abnormality” as fated, unviable, and discardable. Exploring the possibility of answering the postgenomic questions to IVF reveals structural challenges to knowing long-term health implications. Incipient attempts within the fertility clinic at managing these questions shows various strategic techniques, such as leveraging epigenetics to marketable ends and shifts to individual responsibility. (shrink)

Abstract‘Obesity’ has, for decades, been a subject of intense scientific and public interest, and remains a key target for postgenomic science. I examine the emergence of determinism in research into ‘obesity’ in the postgenomic field of metabolomics. I argue that determinism appears in metabolomics research in two ways: firstly, fragmentation and narrow construal of the environment is evident in metabolomics studies on weight loss interventions, resulting in particular features of the environment (notably, dietary intake) having outsized influence while the wider (...) social environment is neglected. Secondly, studies aiming to characterize the metabolic signature of ‘obesity’ are guided by a commitment to a deterministic connection between ‘obesity’ and dysfunction, leading to a neglect or distortion of metabolic heterogeneity across individuals regardless of body size. (shrink)

Environmental epigenetics is increasingly employed to understand the health outcomes of communities who have experienced historical trauma and structural violence. Epigenetics provides a way to think about traumatic events and sustained deprivation as biological “exposures” that contribute to ill-health across generations. In Australia, some Indigenous researchers and clinicians are embracing epigenetic science as a framework for theorising the slow violence of colonialism as it plays out in intergenerational legacies of trauma and illness. However, there is dispute, contention, and caution as (...) well as enthusiasm among these research communities.In this article, we trace strategies of “refusal” (Simpson, 2014) in response to epigenetics in Indigenous contexts. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Australia with researchers and clinicians in Indigenous health, we explore how some construct epigenetics as useless knowledge and a distraction from implementing anti-colonial change, rather than a tool with which to enact change. Secondly, we explore how epigenetics narrows definitions of colonial harm through the optic of molecular trauma, reproducing conditions in which Indigenous people are made intelligible through a lens of “damaged” bodies. Faced with these two concerns, many turn away from epigenetics altogether, refusing its novelty and supposed benefit for Indigenous health equity and resisting the pull of postgenomics. (shrink)

In recent years, postgenomic research, and the fields of epigenetics and microbiome science in particular, have described novel ways in which social processes of racialization can become embodied and result in physiological and health-related racial difference. This new conception of biosocial race has important implications for philosophical debates on the ontology of race. We argue that postgenomic research on race exhibits two key biases in the way that racial schemas are deployed. Firstly, although the ‘new biosocial race’ has been characterized (...) as social race entering into biological processes, it is only particular aspects of social race that are taken to cross the biosocial boundary, resulting in a distorted view of the social component of biosocial race. Secondly, racial categories are assumed to be stable across time and space. This assumption is epistemically limiting, as well as indicating a reliance on a fixed racial ontology. However, the causal pathways for the embodiment of social race, and the different possible modes of embodiment, that postgenomic science is uncovering themselves present a challenge for fixed or static racial ontologies. Given these tensions, we argue that the emerging picture of a shifting landscape of entanglement between the social and the biological requires us to increase the complexity of our ontologies of race, or even embrace a deflationary metaphysics of race. (shrink)

Personalised nutrition (PN) has emerged over the past twenty years as a promising area of research in the postgenomic era and has been popularized as the new big thing out of molecular biology. Advocates of PN claim that previous approaches to nutrition sought general and universal guidance that applied to all people. In contrast, they contend that PN operates with the principle that “one size does not fit all” when it comes to dietary guidance. While the molecular mechanisms studied within (...) PN are new, the notion of a personal dietary regime guided by medical advice has a much longer history that can be traced back to Galen’s “On Food and Diet” or Ibn Sina’s (westernized as Avicenna) “Canon of Medicine”. Yet this history is either wholly ignored or misleadingly appropriated by PN proponents. This (mis)use of history, we argue helps to sustain the hype of the novelty of the proposed field and potential commodification of molecular advice that undermines longer histories of food management in premodern and non-Western cultures. Moreover, it elides how the longer history of nutritional advice always happened in a heavily moralized, gendered, and racialized context deeply entwined with collective technologies of power, not just individual advice. This article aims at offering a wider appreciation of this longer history to nuance the hype and exceptionalism surrounding contemporary claims. (shrink)

Ghost variables are variables in program languages that do not correspond to physical entities. This special issue, based on a panel on “Race as a Ghost Variable” at the 2017 Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, traces ideas of “race” in particular niches of science, technology, and medicine where it is submerged and disavowed, yet wields power. Each paper is a case study exploring ghosts that emerge through the resonance among things as heterogeneous as hair patterns, hormone (...) levels, food tastes, drug use, clinic locations, proximity to disaster, job classifications, and social belonging and suspicion, all of which vibrate with meanings accumulated over long racial histories. Together, the papers further elaborate methods and analytic models for identifying the operations of race—the relations and processes that make it, the effects that it has. A chief appeal of the metaphor of the ghost is that it brings the importance of history to the fore. Ghosts are simultaneously history and the present, not just an accretion of earlier experiences, but the palimpsest left when one tries to erase them. Sometimes faint and hard to discern, sometimes rambunctious and disruptive, ghosts refuse our attempts to simply move on. (shrink)