Paper short abstract:

Recent technological advances have revolutionised the study of DNA, allowing the analysis of ancient DNA and elusive epigenetic marks. These atypical molecular data provide new ways of measuring evolutionary times, and ultimately reveal that molecular time is all but relative.

Paper long abstract:

The study of the evolutionary and demographic history of our species, as well as other living organisms, depends heavily on the calibration of time. Whether it be calendar, isotopic, or molecular, time must be broken down into fundamental constant units to measure evolutionary changes. Recent technological advances have led to routine high-throughput DNA analyses in large cohorts of a wide range of living organisms, which in turn revealed that many different molecular clocks drive evolution. These DNA clocks can have different ticking frequencies depending on which biological parameter is measured (e.g. DNA sequences, epigenetic modifications, phenotypes). In addition, molecular clocks based on changes in the primary DNA sequence are themselves time-dependent, whereby the rate of observable changes in not constant depending on the depth of evolutionary time, natural selection, life history traits, or population demography. In this paper, I will present evolutionary lessons learnt from the study of ancient DNA—the study of DNA in sub-fossil biological specimens—and epigenetics. I will focus in particular on the time-dependency of DNA rates of evolution, as well as on the new perspective that epigenetics offers to understand rapid adaptation to changing environments.

Paper short abstract:

I argue here that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic form of instrumental control of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of potentialities. It is instead closer to alter-modernistic views that disrupt clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sets the stage for a genealogy of postgenomic plasticity. It starts with current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body - that is plasticity as a form of life - is pervasive in traditions predating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizing narratives, I draw on genealogical method to illuminate the unequal distribution of plasticity across gender and ethnic groups. Finally, after analysing postgenomics as a different thought style to genomics, I outline some of its implications for notions of plasticity. I argue that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental control of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead closer to an alter-modernistic view that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community (REF: Meloni, in press).

Paper short abstract:

Technological innovations in reproductive biology have altered patterns of human senescence, the planning of reproductive careers, and reproductive identity. Documenting these innovations, the promises, and the outcomes may assist in developing a critical awareness for evaluating current and future technologies.

Paper long abstract:

The invention of assisted reproductive technologies, including IVF, has altered the patterns of fertility related to chronological age, which until 40 years ago were immutable. This has contributed to a shifting in the age of first birth to over 30 years of age, some extension of reproductive years into the 40’s, and an overall compression of reproductive careers within the lifespan of a given woman such that as few as 2 of her 80+ years are spent in child bearing at what historically was an advanced maternal age. The use of donor eggs and embryos enables women into their 60’s to bear their own children, those of their children, or embryos conceived by others. This has challenged the perceived normality of aging, senescence, and the relative age relationships of parent and child with regards to caring, as the frequency of young people caring for aged parents increases. For children born as a result of donor gametes or embryos, there can be a foreshortening of biological histories as biological parentage may be unknown. For children born after cryopreservation of gametes or embryos, they may perceive themselves as having lived a suspended existence relative to siblings and parents; and for parents, the frozen embryos take on a suspended personhood unlike a natural conception where time moves at the same pace for all events. Finally, reproductive technologies provides a window of observation on the millions of individual gametes that represent a multitude of possible futures subject to selection. Each child becomes the product of a deliberate act, their life trajectory set by selection of possible futures.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the precarious nature of risk and temporality of cure promised by stem cell transplants for children with thalassaemia, using ethnographic material from a study being carried out in India. Whilst state subsidy bridges inequities in care,it creates further dilemmas for parents.

Paper long abstract:

Stem cell transplants offer a promise of cure for several difficult and painful conditions including thalassaemia, arguably the most common single gene disorder that affects millions of children born with a serious haemoglobin disorder, largely in (malaria prone) low and middle income countries of the South. Whilst the technology and expertise for harvesting haematopoietic stem cells might be reasonably stable, what constitutes risk of rejection, failure and long term complications and indeed 'cure' beyond the first couple of years remain widely contested.

This paper will explore the precarious nature of risk and temporality of cure promised by stem cell transplants for children with thalassaemia, using ethnographic material from a study being carried out in India. The main questions posed here are: What are the practical and ethical conundrums faced by parents (predominantly from very poor rural/urban areas) in opting for a transplant for their child. In what ways might treatment subsidies offered by state and non-governmental organisations working with the state affect these decisions? How do they interpret and weigh what constitutes caring and risk in the present with cure in the future, and how might these assessments affect reproductive decisions about having another child who might potentially be a perfect donor for the older sibling who has the condition?

Paper short abstract:

I discuss narratives constructed by researchers around the notions of environment and epigenetics. The environment is defined as modifiable lifestyle factors, the epigenome as a malleable space that can be 'worked' on, while individuals are framed as responsible agents that can change their health.

Paper long abstract:

Epigenetics research highlights the importance of environmental factors that can impact gene regulation by leaving marks on the epigenome. Findings suggest the reversibility of epigenetic changes, while research in transgenerational epigenetics also underlines their heritable character. In this presentation, I draw upon findings from an ethnographic study carried out in two epigenetic research laboratories in the United Kingdom, and discuss the temporalities constructed in epigenetics research. I analyse the narratives constructed by researchers around the notions of environment and epigenetics. I examine the ways scientists use the concept of mediator to frame the interactions between environment, the epigenome and genes. I argue that the use of the mediator metaphor enables scientists to create a space and a time-window for the environment and genes to communicate and interact. I then examine the specific articulations of the notion of environment mobilised by scientists. I show that researchers define the environment as lifestyle factors, while individuals are framed as empowered agents who can "change the fate of their genes" and reverse epigenetic changes by modifying their lifestyle. This narrative identifies the epigenome as a malleable space where individuals can improve their health, while it delineates a time-window for individuals to change. I argue that through these narratives, scientists create space and time in between environment, epigenetics and genes.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines time as 'situated knowledge' in Australian Indigenous cosmologies and epigenetics. In a postcolonial context, the enfolding of time and trauma across generations has implications for current states of health and disease, and political strategies to redress such violence.

Paper long abstract:

Some Indigenous Australians have embraced epigenetic discourses as a political strategy to highlight the negative impacts of intergenerational trauma and slow violence in a postcolonial context. Despite fundamentally different evidentiary regimes, Indigenous scholars are drawing analogies between Indigenous concepts of time and some fields of epigenetics. Indigenous concepts of time are influenced by a cosmological system in which events of the past have an immediacy that makes them part of the present. Epigenetics offers multiple understandings of temporality, from transmission of embodied trauma across generations through linear and biographical time, to the telescoping of past, present and future times in molecular processes and cellular memories. Drawing on the theoretical work of scholars such as Muecke, Verran and Latour, this paper does not attempt to scale differing knowledges into a universal space. Rather, I interrogate these situated entanglements of cosmological time and epigenetic time, and the possibilities of bringing different embodiments and onto-epistemologies of knowledge and evidence-making together, both ethnographically and in legal situations.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we describe: first, the process through which animal evidence gets translated into several understandings of the 'biosociality of trauma' in humans; second, how the spatio-temporalities of "epigenetic trauma" are scaled-up as distinct political possibilities of biosocial intervention.

Paper long abstract:

Epigenetics deals with different temporal and spatial scales of embodiment of social conditions, biographical experiences, and environmental exposures. Several animal and human experiments purport epigenetic effects providing meaning and value to biological traces of life experiences, or even collective tragedies. Epigenetic evidence spans from biochemical processes to long-term remanence at a temporal level, and from the molecular level to the whole milieu, passing through the womb at the spatial level.

We present the results of a lab study conducted around two experimental settings dealing with epigenetic mechanisms of traumatic memory, its consolidation and its transgenerational transmission. First, we describe how these experiments construct the relevance of knowledge produced in animal studies on trauma. In particular, we explore the sociotechnical process through which animal evidence gets translated into several understandings of the 'biosociality of trauma' in humans; namely, how trauma is the result of the reciprocal modulation of events/conditions and their embodiments. Second, and building upon these translations, we explore how the spatio-temporal scales of trauma in the confined setting of labs are scaled-up as distinct political possibilities of biosocial intervention. Starting from this finding, we finally interrogate the potential of biosocial health policies emerging from the ecological dimensions of epigenetic thinking we highlight.