This chapter examines how scientists advocating for research on gene-environment interaction made a case for this new way of thinking about environmental health research. The jumping off place for my analysis is the observation that “the basic problem for skilled social actors is to frame ‘stories’ that help induce cooperation from people in their group that appeal to their identity, while at the same time using the same stories to frame actions against various opponents” (Fligstein 2001: 113; see also Frickel & Gross 2005).2 Such identities and narratives may be most powerful when they draw on the extant stock of meanings, beliefs, ideologies, practices, values, rules, and resources already at play in an arena. However, they also have to navigate those same meanings, tensions, and conflicts. For example, the dynamics of contention in the environmental health arena have meant that, to be persuasive, scientists’ framing of gene-environment interaction have to appeal to stakeholders with widely divergent, indeed opposed, substantive goals and commitments in the regulatory process.
Scientists advocating for research on gene-environment interaction developed a narrative that included both a diagnosis of the problems and challenges facing the environmental health sciences (“diagnostic framing”)3 and a set of proposed solutions to those problems (“prognostic framing”) that highlighted the potential of molecular approaches.4 As I will demonstrate in the following pages, the social institutions, actors, processes, and especially the politics of the environmental health arena provided “readily available scripts” (Fligstein 2001: 110) for scientists eager to promote research on gene-environment interaction. In particular, scientists mobilized long-standing critiques of the process of environmental health risk assessment and regulation.5
At the same time, the dynamics and concerns of the environmental health arena set an important limit on the development of narratives about gene-environment interaction and its potential contributions. That is, while identifying problems and solutions to the challenges of environmental health research, risk assessment, and regulation, advocates of research on gene-environment interaction have exercised care not to wholly undermine the legitimacy of the current risk assessment paradigm. This is not only because the current system serves as the basis for environmental health regulation, and thus public health protection, nor simply because the regulatory agencies themselves are key stakeholders in this process. Rather, as described in Chapter 5, it is because the current system provides the standards by which new, molecular risk assessment techniques are evaluated. As such, framing processes must answer the question, “If this works, why fix it?” without portraying the current system as so “broke” as to be illegitimate (Interview S41).
I call the narrative scientists crafted in response to these manifold challenges a consensus critique. A consensus critique represents an effort to bring stakeholders together around a set of shared concerns that transcend their substantive political, economic, and/or social differences. It diagnoses problems and proposes solutions in ways that are acceptable to actors who seek divergent—and often opposed—ends. Often, this is accomplished by focusing on potential improvements to a central social process, while remaining agnostic about how such improvements may change outcomes, such as the balance of power or opportunities for success among stakeholders. Related, a consensus critique might orient to core values—such as truth or fairness—that are nearly impossible for stakeholders to disavow (though, they may contest their meaning). As such, consensus critiques facilitate collective action in politically contentious arenas.
However, even as it brings stakeholders together around set of shared concerns, a consensus critique will sideline or obfuscate issues that lie beyond its specific definition of core problems and proposed solutions. Social actors whose concerns are excluded by a consensus critique will have good cause, then, to challenge the agenda set in response to it. Consequently, the collective action facilitated by a consensus critique may give rise to the next loci of contention in an arena.
In advocacy for molecular approaches to environmental health research, the consensus critique has centered on technical challenges inherent to the current risk assessment process that a wide variety of stakeholders perceive as salient concerns. It has three main emphases. First, it highlights the challenges inherent in extrapolating from laboratory-based toxicological research— often conducted using highly standardized animal models exposed to high doses of one chemical over a short period of time—to complex interactions between human bodies and their environments in everyday settings. Second, it points to the fact that many more chemicals are in use than have been evaluated in risk assessment by the federal regulatory agencies. Third, it calls attention to questions about how to assess the risks that a substance poses to individuals who are at the sensitive end of the toxic response continuum. The success of this narrative hinges, in large part, on the fact that, although scientists, regulators, industry, and health advocates tend to disagree vehemently about the outcomes of particular risk assessments, they tend to agree nonetheless that the process itself could be improved. The consensus critique, in its firm faith in the promise of the further scientization of environmental health governance via molecular genetics, thus provides a rationale for research on gene-environment interaction, while eliding the substantive political and economic interests underlying conflict in the environmental health arena.
In addition to obviating the substantive differences of stakeholders in favor of a technical critique of risk assessment, the consensus critique offers scientists a remarkable and consequential degree of interpretive flexibility. While positioning research on gene-environment interaction as two the solution to “intractable problems” (Olden 2002: 275), it never defines exactly what gene-environment interaction is, how one should study it, or which molecular genetic technologies or applications thereof offer the greatest promise. As such, it has allowed environmental health scientists to develop research agendas focused on widely varied definitions of gene-environment interaction. Similarly, the consensus critique has opened up space for epidemiologists, toxicologists, and other researchers to develop their own subfield-specific responses to it.
This flexibility, however, has limits. Specifically, the consensus critique fails to account for the social structural issues—such as racial segregation and poverty—that shape disparities in environmental exposures in the United States. Few environmental health scientists call attention to this omission. However, as shown in Chapter 6, the limits of scientization feature prominently in EJ activists’ concerns about the ascendance of gene-environment interaction in the environmental health sciences. As such, the consensus critique is an important starting point for understanding not only how research on gene-environment interaction has emerged in the environmental health sciences, but with what biopolitical consequences.
THE CONSENSUS CRITIQUE
“The Intractable Problems”
The diagnostic component of the consensus critique centers on the limitations of the current risk assessment process. NIEHS administrators characterize these limitations as “the intractable problems” that “have long characterized the field”; they include questions about the ability of extant techniques to assess “intrinsic toxicity to humans, variation in susceptibility, crosstalk or interaction between agents in mixtures, and the type, pattern and magnitude of human exposure to chemicals” (Olden 2002: 275). Toxicologists highlight especially the challenges inherent to the two-year rodent cancer bioassay, which is the current gold standard for carcinogenicity testing:
There are major obstacles in toxicology and this has been obvious to a lot of people: extrapolation from animals to humans, all the issues about exposure, because with the rats, you’re giving a large dose over a concentrated period of time but humans are exposed to varying doses over longer