Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology after the Genome ed. by Sarah S. Richardson and Hallam Stevens (review)

“Postgenomics” was first used in the late 1990s, a period generally considered the heyday of “genomics,” which according to this book began in the mid-1980s and reached a milestone in 2001, with the first results of the Human Genome Project. As with “poststructuralism,” the term implies a period of living in a world shaped by the ongoing but changing presence of genomics, rather than a period in which genomics has been surpassed (as in “postwar” or “postslavery”). Postgenomics is characterized by bigger data, faster sequencing, more bioinformatics operating in “dry” computer labs—all key features of genomics too. But in the context of the continued failure of genomics to deliver the beef in terms of medical applications, postgenomics pays more attention to complexity beyond DNA sequences (which still form a huge part of postgenomic endeavor): to whit, the role of “the environment,” understood to include the cell itself, the organism’s biochemistry (including its microbial flora), the individual’s behavior, and the extra-somatic physical and social environment. Such attention complicates gene-centered reductionism and determinism. This book could have noted that this same narrative of complexification has been adduced by Celeste Michelle Condit for the twentieth century (The Meanings of the Gene, 1999) and Evelyn Fox Keller for the period from the 1980s (Refiguring Life, 1995): history repeats.

Written by science studies scholars, the chapters focus on the science itself and many authors trace this complexification in detail: the increasing attention to the function of DNA and RNA once defined as “junk” (Evelyn Fox Keller); the affective shift from genomics as “boring” DNA sequences to postgenomics as “exciting” (Mike Fortun); the human organism as polygenomic, hosting mosaics of human and non-human genomes (John Dupré); the role of computers in analyzing astronomically big data, taming immense complexity with software and standardization (Adrian Mackenzie); the use of network-thinking as a way into the “hairball” complexity of biological systems (Hallam Stevens); how big data entrain data-sharing and data-curation, thus changing the character of what counts as knowledge and who counts as author (Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli); the way old-school behavior geneticists (actually psychologists) reinvented themselves as champions of complex gene-environment interactions in the wake of genomics’ failure to explain behavior in terms of DNA (Aaron Panofsky); how genomic and now postgenomic scientists in the United States see themselves as standard-bearers of a social justice mission to address health disparities (Catherine Bliss); different approaches to defining “environment” as individual internal biochemistry or social neighborhood (Sara Shostak and Margot Moinester); the way epigenetics tends to focus on the (pregnant) maternal body as a key site for developmental processes (Sarah Richardson).

The authors convey exceptionally well the character of postgenomic science and how genomics has changed since the 1990s. Many of them point out continuities with, or rather postgenomic variants on, some of the issues that emerged around genomics. Richardson argues that epigenetics, hailed as introducing plasticity and indeterminacy, has its own—admittedly more complex—versions of reductionism (to biochemistry) and determinism (mothers trapped in the epigenetic heritage of the matriline they reproduce); a longer timeline might recall the “social hygiene” dimension of eugenics (including the focus on the mother). Mackenzie contends that big complex data and software to analyze them could still “follow the landscape of settled interests” (p. 100). Panofsky reminds us that it is a few of the (post)genomic scientists who make the boldest claims about race and IQ. Bliss comments that postgenomic science’s claim to the high ground of health disparities research (backed by billion-dollar funding) sidelines social science approaches, poverty-stricken cousins by comparison; Shostak and Moinester make a similar point, saying that environment defined as internal biochemistry backgrounds the role of social-structural environment. Fortun contends that attention to scientists’ excitement about complexity could help us nuance the critiques we make about the commercializing and racializing tendencies of (post...