title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, 3333 California Street, Suite 455, San Francisco, CA 94143-0612, USA. Electronic address: Katherine.Darling@ucsf.edu.
authors.forename: Katherine Weatherford
authors.initials: KW
authors.lastname: Darling
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, 3333 California Street, Suite 455, San Francisco, CA 94143-0612, USA. Electronic address: Sara.Ackerman@ucsf.edu.
authors.forename: Sara L
authors.initials: SL
authors.lastname: Ackerman
authors.affiliation: Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco, Box 0560, UCSF, San Francisco, CA 94143-0560, USA. Electronic address: rhiatt@epi.ucsf.edu.
authors.forename: Robert H
authors.initials: RH
authors.lastname: Hiatt
authors.affiliation: Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford University Medical School, 1215 Welch Road, Mod A, Office 72, Stanford, CA 94305-5417, USA. Electronic address: sandra.lee@stanford.edu.
authors.forename: Sandra Soo-Jin
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Lee
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco, 3333 California Street, Suite 455, San Francisco, CA 94143-0612, USA. Electronic address: Janet.Shim@ucsf.edu.
authors.forename: Janet K
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Shim
mesh_terms: D002318:Cardiovascular Diseases / Q000209:etiology / Q000235:genetics; D003920:Diabetes Mellitus / Q000209:etiology / Q000235:genetics; D059647:Gene-Environment Interaction; D036281:Genetic Research; D023281:Genomics; D006801:Humans; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000209:etiology / Q000235:genetics; D014481:United States
keywords: Complex disease; Environment; Gene-environment interactions; Genomics; Health inequalities; Molecularization; USA