Enacting biosocial complexity: Stress, epigenetic biomarkers and the tools of postgenomics

This article analyses attempts to enact complexity in postgenomic experimentations using the case of epigenetic research on biomarkers of psychosocial stress. Enacting complexity in this research means dissecting multiple so-called biosocial processes of health differentiation in the face of stressful experiences. To characterize enactments of biosocial complexity, the article develops the concepts of complexity work and complexification. The former emphasizes the social, technical, and material work that goes into the production of mixed biological and social representations of stress in epigenetics. The latter underlines how complexity can be assembled differently across distinct configurations of experimental work. Specifically, complexification can be defined as producing, stabilizing, and normalizing novel experimental systems that are supposed to improve techno-scientific enactments of complexity. In the case of epigenetics, complexification entails a reconfiguration of postgenomic experimental systems in ways that some actors deem ‘better’ at enacting health as a biosocial process. This study of complexity work and complexification shows that biosocial complexity is hardly a univocal enterprise in epigenetics. Consequently, the article calls for abandoning analysis of these research practices using clear-cut dichotomies of reductionism vs. holism, as well as simplicity vs. complexity. More broadly, the article suggests the relevance of a sociology of complexification for STS approaches to complexity in scientific practices. Complementing the existing focus on complexity as instrumental rhetoric in contemporary sciences, complexification directs analytical attention to the pragmatic opportunities that alternative (biosocial) complexities offer to collective, societal, and political thinking about science in society

Luck, Epigenetics and the Worth of Collective Agents

Ethics & Philosophy of Technolog

Why epigenetics is (not) a biosocial science and why that matters

Epigenetic modifications offer compelling evidence of the environmental etiology of complex diseases. Social and biographical conditions, as well as material exposures, all modulate our biology with consequences for risk predispositions and health conditions. Elucidating these complex biosocial loops is one of the main challenges animating epigenetics. Yet, research on the development of epigenetic biomarkers often pulls in a direction that departs from a view of biological determinants of health embedded in their social and material environment. Taking the example of the epigenetics of cardiovascular diseases, this paper illustrates how common understandings of epigenetic biomarkers strongly lean toward considering them as mere targets for molecular intervention, rather than as correlates of a complex biological and social patterning of disease. This reductionism about biosocial dynamics of disease, we argue, hampers the pursuit of the goals epigenetics has given itself (in cardiology and beyond). If epigenetic mechanisms point to the deep socio-environmental embeddedness of our health, we conclude, future designs and methods of this research may require an improved methodological consideration of a biosocial perspective

Between the genotype and the phenotype lies the microbiome: symbiosis and the making of ‘postgenomic’ knowledge

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>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 <jats:italic>Drosophila melanogaster</jats:italic> 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.</jats:p&gt

Why epigenetics is (not) a biosocial science and why that matters

Epigenetic modifications offer compelling evidence of the environmental etiology of complex diseases. Social and biographical conditions, as well as material exposures, all modulate our biology with consequences for risk predispositions and health conditions. Elucidating these complex biosocial loops is one of the main challenges animating epigenetics. Yet, research on the development of epigenetic biomarkers often pulls in a direction that departs from a view of biological determinants of health embedded in their social and material environment. Taking the example of the epigenetics of cardiovascular diseases, this paper illustrates how common understandings of epigenetic biomarkers strongly lean toward considering them as mere targets for molecular intervention, rather than as correlates of a complex biological and social patterning of disease. This reductionism about biosocial dynamics of disease, we argue, hampers the pursuit of the goals epigenetics has given itself (in cardiology and beyond). If epigenetic mechanisms point to the deep socio-environmental embeddedness of our health, we conclude, future designs and methods of this research may require an improved methodological consideration of a biosocial perspective

Critiques from within. A modest proposal for reclaiming critique for responsible innovation

How can critique in responsible innovation (RI) become generative? The anything-but-neutral relations between science, technology and society, at the core of science and technology studies, have led to the development of different repertoires of critique. None of them fitted the configurations in the biomedical practices we came to study. There, biomedical experts presented us with an analysis of the power relations perpetuated through the mainstream practices in their fields and had built socio-material alternatives to the common forms of practicing biomedicine. The paper suggests conceptualising critical observations voiced by experts embedded into socio-material alternatives as ‘critique from within’ yielding collateral goods and bads. Rather than asking how to foster responsibility conditions in RI, the paper suggests modestly reclaiming critique by articulating already existing forms of responsibility practices developed by experts themselves and analysing the ambivalent effects they engender

‘Epigenetics and Society': a forum for the theoretical, ethical and societal appraisal of a burgeoning science

Epigenetics Communications is proud to announce the introduction of a new section entitled ‘Epigenetics and Society’ (EaS). EaS offers a forum for researcher from various disciplines to engage with the theoretical, interdisciplinary, ethical, social and political dimensions of epigenetics. Authors, within and beyond academia, are invited to submit manuscripts of original research, reviews or perspectives/correspondences dealing with these different facets of epigenetics. The EaS section is meant to provide an opportunity for sharing work across disciplinary borders in ways that both illuminate the science-society intersections around epigenetics and promote their operationalization in multidisciplinary and collaborative scientific practices