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418 24 Gene-Environment Interaction and Medical Sociology Sara Shostak, Brandeis University Jeremy Freese, Northwestern University causation, including the “looping effects” (Hacking 1995) of genetic categories and the enduring influence of fundamental causes of health and illness , especially as capacities for intervention change (Link and Phelan 1995; Freese and Lutfey , forthcoming). Genes, Environments, and Health At the turn of the century, gene-environment interaction emerged at the center of research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (Schwartz and Collins 2007), as well as in the human sciences more broadly (Rutter, Moffitt, and Caspi 2006).2 As just one measure of its currency at the NIH, in 2006, health and human services secretary Mike Leavitt announced that the president ’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2007 would include $68 million for the Genes and Environment Initiative, an NIH research effort to combine genetic analysis and environmental technology development to understand how gene-environment interactions contribute to the etiology of common diseases.3 The prominent role of the concept of gene-environment interaction in this initiative was highlighted in the press release that announced it: “Differences in our genetic makeup certainly influence our risks of developing various illnesses. . . . We only have to look at family medical histories The boundaries between sociology and biology have long been sites of tension and contestation (Anderson 1967; Pescosolido 2006).1 In part, these contestations emerge from a concern that biological accounts of the production of human difference pose a threat to sociology’s defining focus on social and environmental causes of human health and social outcomes (Duster 2006). Medical sociologists have been at the vanguard of efforts to find productive modes of engagement between the social sciences and contemporary human genetics. Increasingly, these efforts center on gene-environment interaction. We consider here two domains of social scientific inquiry that address gene-environment interaction vis-à-vis health and illness. First, we discuss analyses of the social implications of research on gene-environment interaction , including studies of public understandings and beliefs about genetic and environmental causes of health and social outcomes. Second, we consider research that uses information about genetics and gene-environment interaction as a lever to reveal mechanisms of social and social psychological causation of health and illness. Taken together, this work points to the importance of moving past the assumption of an essential tension between genetic and social (or other environmental) explanations for health and illness toward more integrative analyses that can encompass multiple and simultaneous forms of Gene-Environment Interaction and Medical Sociology 419 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 [emphasis added]). In the United Kingdom, the UK Biobank represents a massive investment on the part of the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the Department of Health, with the goal of elucidating “the complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors involved in the aetiology of common diseases” (Tutton, Kaye, and Hoeyer 2004, 284). Gene-environment interaction is also of great interest in the private sector. In the United States, the GEI is to be “accelerated” by the efforts of a public-private partnership, the Genetic Association Information Network (GAIN), a joint venture between the NIH, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals , and the biotech company Affymetrix. Social scientists also increasingly are taking up questions about gene-environment interaction. Indeed, one of the ironies of the success of the Human Genome Project is that it highlights the imperative for sophisticated conceptualizations and measures of the social environment, long the jurisdiction of sociology (Pescosolido 2006; Perrin and Lee 2007). While not explicitly focused on gene-environment interaction, the recent call for a “sociology of disease,” which would incorporate biomarkers into studies of the experience of trajectories of illness, likewise points to the need for knowledge about the intersections of social and biological pathways (Timmermans and Haas 2008). With the inclusion of DNA and biomarker data in large-scale social science data sets (Weinstein, Vaupel, and Wachter 2008; Finch, Vaupel, and Kinsella 2000), the opportunities for sociologists to study gene-environment interaction will proliferate rapidly in the coming years. Likewise, sociologists already have given consideration to social implications of geneenvironment interaction, pointing to many concerns and opportunities for the years ahead. Social Implications of Research on Gene-Environment Interaction Human genetics has been centrally concerned with understanding how genes work as causes of development and of disease and has turned only recently to studies of gene-environment...

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