Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the Molecular Politics of Eating

Epigenetics raises questions about the governance of food and the environment more generally in the interests of human health. It remains to be seen how or whether this will translate into regulatory changes, for example, banning the use of Bisphenol-A in food containers, a rethinking of the regulation of supplements and functional foods, or renewed attention to the public health impact of improving prenatal care. Or how it might translate into individual action: as epigenetics becomes more familiar to public audiences through newspaper accounts, food health claims, and popularizations, it will be important to track how consumers incorporate this narrative into their food choices and their understandings of food and the body. At its heart, nutritional epigenetics represents a hope for intervention in the long-term health of bodies and thus the general health of populations, via the medium of food. Epigenetics has a very specific temporal logic to it, one that emphasizes the multigenerational impact of the environments surrounding fetuses and children. Given the social and cultural importance of food and eating and the fraught nature of contemporary parenting when it comes to feeding children, the unfolding generation of these specific links between nutrition and health calls for our continued critical attention

Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the Molecular Politics of Eating

Epigenetics raises questions about the governance of food and the environment more generally in the interests of human health. It remains to be seen how or whether this will translate into regulatory changes, for example, banning the use of Bisphenol-A in food containers, a rethinking of the regulation of supplements and functional foods, or renewed attention to the public health impact of improving prenatal care. Or how it might translate into individual action: as epigenetics becomes more familiar to public audiences through newspaper accounts, food health claims, and popularizations, it will be important to track how consumers incorporate this narrative into their food choices and their understandings of food and the body. At its heart, nutritional epigenetics represents a hope for intervention in the long-term health of bodies and thus the general health of populations, via the medium of food. Epigenetics has a very specific temporal logic to it, one that emphasizes the multigenerational impact of the environments surrounding fetuses and children. Given the social and cultural importance of food and eating and the fraught nature of contemporary parenting when it comes to feeding children, the unfolding generation of these specific links between nutrition and health calls for our continued critical attention

Technologies of living substance : tissue culture and cellular life in twentieth century biomedicine

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, February 2000.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 357-380).This thesis is a historical and cultural analysis of the development of tissue culture, that is, techniques for growing living cells and tissues outside of the bodies of complex organisms. The development of these techniques represents an important epistemological shift in biology from in vivo to in vitro experimentation. This was not just a shift from use of a whole organ/organism to use of a fragment of the body, but a shift in the visualization and conceptualization of the body and its processes as they occur at the level of cells and tissues. Here it is argued that tissue culture was an essential part of a new sense of cellular life, not as a static building block of larger bodies, but as a dynamic and interactive entity which undergoes constant change, and is the functional unit of processes of growth, reproduction, aging, cancer, infection, and death. The thesis begins with an analysis of the work of embryologist Ross Harrison in growing isolated fragments of embryonic nerve tissue outside of the body in 1907. It follows the elaboration of Harrison's work by the surgeon Alexis Carrel, and the more general development of the technique over the early decades of the twentieth century. There is a close examination of the techniques for visualizing cellular life grown outside of the body, as well as the appearance of reactions to this form of life in a wider public culture. The methodological approach is a close examination of the material practices of tissue culture laboratories, and the images, ideas, and information about cells and their relation to bodies produced thereby. The movement of these ideas and images from laboratory to public culture and back is at the center of the final chapters, in which the history of the first widely used human cell line, HeLa, is examined, and more recent legal and ethical debates about the status and ownership of the Mo cell line. Rather than being a comprehensive history of tissue culture, this thesis takes historical episodes from this twentieth century biomedical practice to analyze the constitution of cellular life through the objects of tissue culture, and the ways in which these objects have been scientifically, technically, and culturally productive.Hannah L. Landecker.Ph.D

Ten Thousand Journal Articles Later: Ethnography of «The Literature» in Science

El artículo explora las dificultades que, para la historia de la ciencia y la tecnología del siglo XX, supone la lectura de un gran número de artículos científicos. Se argumenta que hay tensión entre dos estrategias distintas: la lectura en detalle de los artículos clave y el análisis de citaciones y otros métodos automáticos de rastrear la literatura. El desafío que supone alternar estos dos métodos y la necesidad de mantener una aproximación interpretativa cuando nos enfrentamos a una extensa literatura (miles o decenas de miles de artículos) pueden ser abordados aproximándonos a la literatura científica como si de un informante se tratara, en el sentido antropológico. Caracterizamos a la literatura científica como capaz de describir el cambio en los conceptos y en las prácticas científicas y técnicas. El artículo explora esta estrategia y propone centrarse en asuntos tales como los materiales y métodos (y las prácticas que conllevan), así como en los problemas a los que éstos contribuyen o intentan solucionar

Human embryo models made from pluripotent stem cells are not synthetic; they arent embryos, either.

Embryo models are potentially highly impactful for human health research because their development recapitulates otherwise inaccessible events in a poorly understood area of biology, the first few weeks of human life. Casual reference to these models as synthetic embryos is misleading and should be approached with care and deliberation