Hannah
Landecker (UCLA)
The Social Environments of Chromatin Research
What happens to divestments of the social in a
field in which “the social” is being constituted as a research object and a
potential cause of cancer or diabetes amenable to detailed molecular
characterization? With the rise of a field of study called epigenetics,
biomedical researchers have begun to focus on molecules that regulate gene
expression, such as methyl groups that attach to the cytosine residues of DNA
and histone proteins that affect how tightly chromatin is wound in chromosomes.
Many of these molecules are thought to be open to environmental influence, with
nutrition, smoking, stress and endocrine disruptors all being investigated for
their impact on gene regulation in early life and beyond. Epigenetics thus
suggests that such culturally tender subjects as eating, parental behavior, and
industrial pollution are integral to gene regulation, and provides a molecular
conduit model for how social things become biological ones. Reviews and
speculation in the field connect social measures such as prenatal care and food
regulation strongly to the molecules of epigenetic gene regulation. However,
observation of laboratory meetings and conference talk concerning the
biochemistry of epigenetics would suggest that in day-to-day practice these
molecules are just barely treated as being part of living things, much less
strongly connected to human social life. This paper looks at how molecular
biologists studying histone proteins talk about, think about, and work with
objects that are putatively at the biochemical end of a long chain of reactions
that lead from social to biological life.
