Enacting the molecular imperative: How gene-environment interaction research links bodies and environments in the post-genomic age

Abstract

Despite a proclaimed shift from ‘nature versus nurture’ to ‘genes and environment’ paradigms within biomedical and genomic science, capturing the environment and identifying gene-environment interactions (GEIs) has remained a challenge. What does ‘the environment’ mean in the post-genomic age? In this paper, we present qualitative data from a study of 33 principal investigators funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to conduct etiological research on three complex diseases (cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes). We examine their research practices and perspectives on the environment through the concept of molecularization: the social processes and transformations through which phenomena (diseases, identities, pollution, food, racial/ethnic classifications) are re-defined in terms of their molecular components and described in the language of molecular biology. We show how GEI researchers’ expansive conceptualizations of the environment ultimately yield to the imperative to molecularize and personalize the environment. They seek to ‘go into the body’ and re-work the boundaries between bodies and environments. In the process, they create epistemic hinges to facilitate a turn from efforts to understand social and environmental exposures outside the body, to quantifying their effects inside the body. GEI researchers respond to these emergent imperatives with a mixture of excitement, ambivalence and frustration. We reflect on how GEI researchers struggle to make meaning of molecules in their work, and how they grapple with molecularization as a methodological and rhetorical imperative as well as a process transforming biomedical research practices.

The sociology of cancer: a decade of research

“…Prior () explores how the gene becomes a ‘boundary object’ supporting these different positions and Darling et al . (: 51) consider how professionals make meaning out of molecularisation through, ‘epistemic hinges to facilitate a turn from efforts to understand social and environmental exposures outside the body, to quantifying their effects inside the body’.…”

Anthropological perspectives on genomic data, genetic ancestry, and race

“…With regard to race, embodiment has been employed to conceptualize how bodies evidence ideas about human variation, inclusive of how bodies become racialized (Ahmed, ; Alcoff, ; Ngo, ). The embodiment concept has also been utilized to explore the broader social meanings surrounding genetic testing, genetic risk, and epigenetic inheritance (Chilibeck, Lock, & Sehdev, ; Darling, Ackerman, Hiatt, Lee, & Shim, ; Kuzawa & Sweet, ; Lock, ; Lock, Freeman, Chilibeck, Beveridge, & Padolsky, ). These studies highlight the intersections of sociocultural, historic, political, and economic factors with how genomic data are utilized and interpreted by scientists, patients, consumers, and other laypeople.…”

Ten Theses on the Subject of Biology and Politics: Conceptual, Methodological, and Biopolitical Considerations

“…So, for example, Landecker (2011) argues that "the experimental formalization of food" in epigenetics research can lead to food "stand [ing] in for the environment in the dyad of 'gene-environment interactions'" (168). Similarly, Darling et al (2016) contend that because "biospecimen collection" is seen as "a marker of robust science," researchers often use the body as a "surrogate" for the environment (55) with the effect that they "reduce social processes to bodies" (57). In both cases, a narrow focus on a specific spatial scale obscures from analytic view the broader social and political milieux in which food is produced and rendered available or in which psychological and biological stressors are generated and experienced.…”

“…Another problem with ignoring the temporal and spatial multiscalarity of biocultural creatures and biocultural habitats is the mobilization of a neoliberal conception of the individual according to which individuals are held to be responsible for anticipating and ameliorating the health and developmental effects of toxins or poverty or stress by managing their homes or workspaces or illnesses by themselves (Darling et al 2016;Mansfield 2012;Meloni and Testa 2014;Rose 2007). To focus on the individual without considering the many scales of the social and material environments that shape their lives is to individualize and moralize problems like pollution, economic transformation, and political violence that are properly conceived as collective problems demanding collective, political solutions (Brown 2005).…”