ABSTRACT

Producing biosocial complexity: epigenetics and the tools of postgenomics

In this paper, I draw from a five-year fieldwork to describe how scientists navigate the uncertainties, constraints, and tensions of the so-called post-genomic age. How do they attempt to produce a dynamic, non-gene-centric and environmentally embedded representation of life from the standpoint of genomic research infrastructures? I argue that the complexification of life sciences’ experimental systems offers a prolific entry point on scientists’ enactments of the exigencies to entangle large volumes of data, to align diverging aims of research (e.g. mechanistic, predictive, populational), as well as to integrate heterogeneous kinds of data (from scores of socio-economic status, to postcodes and functional analyses of gene expression) in post-genomics. Studies of these complexification processes, I conclude, could promote a documentation of the material conditions of possibility of post-genomics and move beyond oppositional and disciplinary distinctions between thick and thin ontologies of the biosocial determinants of health. 

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. Luca Chiapperino is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Lecturer at the STSLab of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. His research interests sit at the crossroads of Science and Technology Studies, moral and applied philosophy; a position from which he studies the normative dimensions of biomedicine, as well as the multiple ways value-laden and factual elements get articulated in practices of knowledge-production.

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