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

In the decade following the controversy surrounding the completion of the Human Genome Project, genomics realized neither the promises of personalized genetic medicine nor the fears of a genetic brave new world. Instead, as Sarah Richardson and Hallam Stevens suggest in their introduction to this fine collection of essays, we have arrived at the beginning of a “postgenomic” era in biology and medicine. An ironic consequence of the intense study of genes has been the revelation that most of the human genome (99 percent by some estimates) does not “code” for any identifiable human traits. John Dupré reflects in his contribution that the relationship between genotype and phenotype has become even more fragmented the further it has been studied by genomics researchers. How are we to make sense, for example, of the substantial genomic variation among different kinds of tissues in the same body? The state of the art in genomics seems to have arrived where many science scholars started in the 1990s—profoundly skeptical of just what the study of genes can tell us. The rich contributions to this volume suggest the topography of this new postgenomic era for historians, social scientists, and philosophers.

There are a few themes of interest for historians of medicine and public health. The first of these is the question of environmental or social influences on the genome, many of which are studied by epigenetics. The definition and politics of epigenetic explanations for disease are not settled, nor are they free from the prior, and problematic, efforts to apply genomics to society and medicine. Catherine Bliss’s essay discusses efforts by genomics researchers to claim issues of health justice, previously the preserve of feminists and civil rights activists, as questions for postgenomic research and governance. Bliss cautions that these approaches, in continuing to elevate laboratory work, result in the flattening or eliding of socioeconomic questions. Likewise, Sara Shostak, and Margot Moinister discuss how studies of the “exposome” in New York neighborhoods may conceal social processes and social structures even as they promise to reveal chemical influences.

A skeptical attitude toward the degree to which postgenomics represents a break from the problematic aspects of genetic explanations continues in those essays that address determinism. Here, the emphasis of the collection runs in tension with previous assessments of epigenetics as an alternative to genetic determinism. As Evelyn Fox Keller explains in her brief history of the gene, philosophers, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists working on topics in biomedicine were generally critical of genetic reductionism, in many cases setting this approach in the context of the fraught history of eugenics. Postgenomics fares little better. Richards and Aaron Panofsky provide cogent arguments, drawn from discussions of maternal epigenetics and behavioral genetics respectively, that the move towards a more environmentally aware or holistic postgenomic approaches has not erased or substantially modified some of the core deterministic ways of thinking in these fields. Holistic explanations may be no less deterministic than reductionist explanations.

Even as points of critique remain constant between genomics and postgenomics, this collection highlights the importance of new data manipulation methods in shaping our understanding of what genes are. As much as a collection of nucleotides, practices of data collection and analysis work to constitute the genome as an object. Adrian McKenzie and Stevens both stress the importance of the design of computer systems for this task, while Rachel Ankeny and Sabina Leonelli discuss how assumptions about scientific credit and authorship may need to shift in order to respond to the importance of practices such as curating and collecting in contemporary genomics research. Mike Fortun reflects on the dialectic of surprise and tedium that characterizes the search for genomic variants amidst a flood of data, emphasizing the affective register of this labor of searching.

The twentieth century may have been the century of the gene, but that century is past. While living in a...