through these theoretical lenses—and, as highlighted by the scientists whom I interviewed—the environmental health sciences faced myriad challenges in the waning decades of the twentieth century. I detail these challenges in the following chapters. In brief, they include the relative lack of autonomy of the environmental health sciences as a field,27 ongoing challenges to and critiques of environmental epidemiology and toxicology in controversies over risk assessment and regulation, the rising power of genetic (versus all other) explanations for human health and illness, and growing concern that specific institutions of environmental health research—including the NIEHS and the National Toxicology Program (NTP)—were losing status, funding, and political support. My argument in this book is that research on gene-environment interaction, with its focus inside the human body and at the molecular level, has been compelling to environmental health scientists precisely insofar as it offers a diverse array of strategies for meeting these challenges.28
Strategies and Consequences
Environmental health scientists had choices about how they responded to these challenges, and the decision to take up research on gene-environment interaction was not without risks. I ask ”How did environmental health scientists, as “skilled social actors” (Fligstein 2001), perceive, evaluate, and pursue this particular strategy for strengthening their field, garnering resources for their institutions, protecting their professional jurisdiction, and doing important and meaningful scientific research, as they understand it?29 To answer this question, the subsequent chapters take up also the following topics:
What motivated environmental health scientists to make gene-environment interaction a defining focus of their research?
How did environmental health scientists build a coalition around the idea that understanding gene-environment interaction is integral to disease prevention and public health? What identities or stories were at play in constructing this coalition?
How have environmental health scientists articulated the relevance of gene-environment interactions in the context of a field that historically has oriented primarily on public policy rather than on biomedical interventions?
In what ways have scientists adapted molecular genetic and genomic technologies, developed originally to study the health of individuals, to answer questions about how environmental exposures affect population health?
How did advocates for research on gene-environment interaction in the environmental health sciences mobilize support for this view of the future of the environmental health sciences?
Answering these questions requires a careful consideration of the history of the environmental health sciences, especially environmental epidemiology and toxicology, and the relationships among biomedicine, public health, and public policy.30 Therefore, although the phenomena that I seek to explain are decidedly contemporary, my analysis is and must be deeply historical.31 The historical accounts highlighted in this book come from archival data, scientists’ written and oral reflections on the trajectories of research in their individual laboratories and/or field, and the work of historians of science and medicine. History is important to understanding actor’s strategies, which vary under different conditions of power and uncertainty; moreover, as will be seen, such strategies have drawn extensively on existing rules, resources, understandings and controversies regarding the warrants of particular fields, institutions, and professions (Fligstein 2001: 106). In crafting this aspect of the analysis, I draw on a relatively loose understanding of path dependence, that is, the insight that key decisions at earlier points in time produce outcomes that set history on a course from which it is often is difficult to return (Katznelson 2003: 290).32 At the same time, I am interested in how the past can be a source of creativity as well as constraint; history may not only foreclose options but “may also lead to and shape the switch points confronted by later generations, drawing fault-lines along which later crises erupt and creating options for new solutions” (Haydu 1998: 357).
Lastly, I consider the consequences of these transformations for how we understand and intervene in the relationships among human bodies, the environment, and health and illness. Specifically, I argue that examining how environmental health scientists and policy makers have taken up, modified, and advocated for research on gene-environment interaction provides an important means of understanding what we know and don’t know about relationships about our bodies, the environment, and human health and illness.
In making this argument, I draw on contemporary writings on biopolitics and coproduction. Biopolitics refers broadly to “all the specific strategies and contestations over problematizations of collective human vitality, morbidity and mortality” (Rabinow & Rosee 2006: 195–217; see also Foucault 1978/1990). Today, three elements constitute biopolitics: “[k]nowledge of vital life processes, power relations that take humans as living beings as their object, and the modes of subjectivation through which subjects work on themselves qua living beings” (Rabinow & Rose 2006). The central insight of coproduction is that our ways of knowing the world are inextricable from controversies regarding how to best live in it (Jasanoff 2004). To understand biopolitics, then, one must examine not only knowledge production, but also the politics of institutions, the making of identities, and their relationships to each other (Epstein 2007). In the context of environmental health, these perspectives highlight the importance of tracing the relationships among knowledge production in the environmental health sciences, the governance of environmental risks to human health, the identification of individual and groups at risk, and the development of notions of the ethics and responsibilities of such persons. When stabilized in relationship to each other, these elements produce a biopolitical paradigm, that is, a “framework of ideas, standards, formal procedures, and unarticulated understandings that specify how concerns about health, medicine, and the body are made the simultaneous focus of biomedicine and state policy” (Epstein 2007: 17). Although we may not be aware of it, the biopolitical paradigm of the environmental health sciences profoundly shapes how we live today.
Chicago Bans Bottles with BPA plastic.33 San Francisco Passes Cellphone Radiation Law.34 Bottle Maker to Stop Using Plastic Linked to Health Concerns.35 Ground Zero Workers Reach Deal over Claims.36 Current newspaper headlines highlight the many ways that the environmental health sciences enter into our daily lives, determining not only what technologies and products we use, but also what we know about their effects on our health.37 Federal regulatory agencies, such as the EPA and FDA, and their counterparts at the state and local levels, use the results of environmental health research to determine the methods and extent to which they will regulate the emission of industrial chemicals into our communities and whether products containing specific chemicals should remain on the shelves of grocery and drug stores. Industries use data from environmental health research to decide what combinations of chemicals they will use to produce consumer products, as well as to justify their decisions when they are challenged by regulators or activists. In the courts, environmental health science contributes to decisions about whether people who have been exposed to an environmental contaminant should receive compensation for its effects on their bodies or on the bodies of their children. At the same time, as consumers, we increasingly are called upon to use information from environmental health research to make personal choices about the potential risks of the water we drink (“That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy”38), the food we eat (“High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi”39), and the products we use on our bodies and in our homes (“Should You Worry About the Chemicals in Your Makeup?”40) (Szasz 2007).
Given the critical role of environmental health research in modern life, social scientists have paid remarkably little attention to the fields, institutions, social actors, and practices most central to the production of contemporary environmental health science.41 To date, research has tended to focus on the social life of the products of environmental health science, as when specific research on the health effects of a chemical are challenged by environmental health activists (Allen 2003; Brown 2007;
