尽管在生物医学和基因组科学中宣布了从“自然与养育”到“基因和环境”范式的转变,捕获环境和识别基因-环境相互作用(GEI)仍然是一个挑战。在后基因组时代,“环境”意味着什么?在这篇论文中,我们提供了一项由美国国立卫生研究院资助的33名主要研究人员进行的研究的定性数据,该研究对三种复杂疾病(癌症,心血管疾病和糖尿病)。我们通过分子化的概念来研究他们对环境的研究实践和观点:社会过程和转变,通过这些现象(疾病,身份,污染,食物,种族/种族分类)根据其分子成分重新定义,并以分子生物学语言进行描述。我们展示了GEI研究人员对环境的扩展概念化最终如何产生对环境进行分子化和个性化的必要性。他们寻求“进入身体”并重新工作身体和环境之间的界限。在这个过程中,它们创造了认识的铰链,以促进从理解身体外的社会和环境暴露的努力转向,量化它们在体内的影响。GEI研究人员以兴奋的混合来回应这些紧急的需要,矛盾和沮丧。我们反思了GEI研究人员如何在他们的工作中努力使分子具有意义,以及他们如何努力将分子化作为方法论和修辞的必要条件,以及改变生物医学研究实践的过程。
Despite a proclaimed shift from \'nature versus nurture\' to \'genes and environment\' paradigms within biomedical and genomic science, capturing the environment and identifying gene-environment interactions (GEIs) has remained a challenge. What does \'the environment\' mean in the post-genomic age? In this paper, we present qualitative data from a study of 33 principal investigators funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to conduct etiological research on three complex diseases (cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes). We examine their research practices and perspectives on the environment through the concept of
molecularization: the social processes and transformations through which phenomena (diseases, identities, pollution, food, racial/ethnic classifications) are re-defined in terms of their molecular components and described in the language of molecular biology. We show how GEI researchers\' expansive conceptualizations of the environment ultimately yield to the imperative to molecularize and personalize the environment. They seek to \'go into the body\' and re-work the boundaries between bodies and environments. In the process, they create epistemic hinges to facilitate a turn from efforts to understand social and environmental exposures outside the body, to quantifying their effects inside the body. GEI researchers respond to these emergent imperatives with a mixture of excitement, ambivalence and frustration. We reflect on how GEI researchers struggle to make meaning of molecules in their work, and how they grapple with
molecularization as a methodological and rhetorical imperative as well as a process transforming biomedical research practices.