Molecularization has met with myriad challenges in the context of environmental health research. Analytically, these challenges make the environmental health sciences an advantageous case for observing the social processes through which molecularization is accomplished. First, molecularizing environmental health research has required that scientists find ways to operationalize gene-environment interaction in work objects (Casper 1998), technologies, and experimental systems relevant to environmental health research. As belied by their names—e.g., environmental response genes, molecular biomarkers—most often, these new objects and practices are hybrid forms that combine more traditional objects with new materials or techniques. The following chapters describe the development of these new ways of doing environmental health research. At the same time, this is a deeply historical analysis, attending particularly to how new techniques extend previous research practices, are shaped by institutional concerns, and seek to address the structural vulnerabilities of the field.
Second, and related, much research in the environmental health sciences is directed toward applications in environmental health risk assessment, regulation, and policy making. Assessing whether a chemical causes mutations in DNA has been a required part of the registration of new chemicals since the passage of the Toxic Substances Control Act in 1976 (Frickel 2004). However, the regulation of the ambient environment depends rather on measurements of chemicals in the air, water, and soil; historically, it has not taken gene-environment interaction into account. Related, the gold standard of toxicological testing relies on the thirteen-week and two-year rodent bioassays and other whole animal studies (NTP 2002). Consequently, even as environmental health scientists argue that molecular genetic and genomic techniques will improve their contributions to environmental regulation, they have had to develop what I call technologies of translation as a means of articulating new modes of knowledge production within established regulatory processes.
Third, and again in contrast to many other domains of research in the life sciences, molecularization requires that environmental health scientists develop strategies for conceptualizing and measuring not just the human body, but the environment at the molecular level. Such strategies have emerged as a site of contention between scientists and environmental justice activists. In particular, activists question the appropriateness of molecular measures, given the extensive evidence of race- and class-based inequalities in environmental exposures (Brulle & Pellow 2006; Evans& Kantrowitz 2002). Many activists are concerned that social structural factors that put poor people and people of color at increased risk of environmental exposure will be obfuscated, however inadvertently, as research on molecular genetic research recasts the environment as something best understood and measured at the molecular level.
Simply put, the environmental health sciences provide an intriguing vantage point for studying the consequences of genetics precisely because the environment is their jurisdictional focus. In fact, some environmental health scientists position their research on gene-environment interaction as a corrective to the Human Genome Project’s genocentric view of human health and illness: “[G]enocentric views reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the disease process, and have led to unrealistic expectations and disappointment” (Olden & White 2005: 721). In contrast to genocentrism, environmental health scientists contend that research on gene-environment interaction is the key to explaining when and how genetic variations shape human health and illness: “Differences in our genetic makeup certainly influence our risks of developing various illnesses. . . . We only have to look at family medical histories to know that is true. But whether a genetic predisposition actually makes a person sick depends on the interaction between genes and the environment” (NIEHS 2006; see also Schwartz & Collins 2007).
Sociologists have expressed skepticism about the extent to which scientific research on gene-environment interaction actually represents an alternative to geneticization. Some have suggested that research on gene-environment interaction generates merely a narrative of “enlightened geneticization,” which privileges genetic explanations and minimizes the effect of environmental factors, even while acknowledging that they play a role in human health and illness (Hedgecoe 2001). Others note that media coverage of research on gene-environment interaction selectively emphasizes genes and largely ignores environmental causes (Horwitz 2005).
My analysis shifts the focus, however, to the question of how different kinds of research on gene-environment interaction conceptualize and measure genes, environments, and their effects on human bodies. This allows us to see that at stake in this research is not only the question of whether genes or the environment cause human health and illness. Rather, I demonstrate that, by conceptualizing and measuring the environment at the molecular level, research on gene-environment interaction has profound consequences for how we understand the environment and how it affects our health.
ONE “Toxicology Is a Political Science”
In September 2007, an array of prominent environmental health scientists and activists was called to testify before Congress. Seated before the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the House of Representative’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform were Samuel Wilson, then acting Director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), George Lucier, former Director of the National Toxicology Program (NTP), Lynn Goldman, a professor of environmental health science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, Peggy Shepard, the Executive Director of the EJ group West Harlem Environmental Action (WEACT), and Stefani Hines, a member of the National Advisory Environmental Health Sciences Council (NAEHSC).1 The question before them was no less than whether the NIEHS was fulfilling its public health mission. Specifically under scrutiny was “a new set of research priorities” at the NIEHS, which had been implemented by its recently departed Director, David Schwartz.2 The chairman of the subcommittee opened the hearing with two questions: “At what cost has come Dr. Schwartz’s new direction for the NIEHS?” and “Should the new NIEHS research directions and priorities . . . continue?” (US GPO 2007: 2).
Particularly at stake in the hearing was the boundary between biomedicine, with its focus on curing disease in individuals, and public health, with its focus on population-based disease prevention. In fact, the focal concern of the subcommittee was whether the NIEHS was becoming too biomedical in its orientation and thereby failing to meet its public health mandate. In his opening comments, the subcommittee chair expressed concern about the shifting of “significant resources toward research that was clinical in nature and which focused on discoveries that would contribute to treating or curing disease once a patient was already afflicted” (US GPO 2007: 1). In advance of this hearing, the staff of the subcommittee had “performed its own analysis of the NIEHS’ new research direction and priorities” and reached the conclusion that the public health focus of the NIEHS was being replaced with “programs of a clinical nature” (US GPO 2007: 2).
During the hearing, the speakers used a series of contrasts to distinguish the NIEHS and the NTP in particular, as well as the environmental health sciences more broadly, from the clinical focus of most biomedical research. To begin, in contrast to research that focuses on clinical treatments, the environmental health sciences focus on disease prevention: “NIEHS is the only institute with a primary mission of public health, rather than clinical medicine . . . ” (US GPO 2007: 69). In contrast to research that is oriented to the development of new drugs or medical treatments, the environmental health sciences inform public policy, “mak[ing] major impacts on human health through research translation to public policy, not to the bedside” (US GPO 2007: 69). In contrast to research that is individually oriented, the environmental health sciences contribute to protecting the health of the population, serving as “the source of key information regarding the health impacts of pollution . . . used daily in setting protective federal, state, and local policies, in arguing for the protection of children, the elderly, and our communities” (US GPO 2007: 77). In contrast to research that is defined by a specific disease or organ, the environmental health sciences investigate environmental exposures which affect multiple bodily systems and are associated with myriad diseases: “Every disease has an environmental component, thus NIEHS’s responsibilities encompass all human diseases, rather than following the more common model of focus on a specific disease or organ system”3 (US GPO 2007: 26). In contrast to research that can be accomplished in laboratory and clinical settings alone, the