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Paper short abstract:

To understand and anticipate biomedical futures, I will illustrate how researchers create knowledge about the microbiome, aspiring to blend the 'molecular vision' of traditional molecular biology with an ecosystemic view and how and why anthropologists can intervene in this process

Paper long abstract:

When I first started to study medical anthropology in the late '90s, biomedicine and its professionals were the main actors shaping and reproducing processes of medicalization and biopower. Through the years, those same professionals shifted from being actors of those processes to recipients together with their patients, especially with regard to technology and policy innovations. That's why I decided to shift the focus of my ethnographic gaze from the biomedical encounter to the places where those innovations originate. In particular, I analysed how researchers give shape to new frontiers in biomedicine and how this matters to people's lives. I will present the results of my long-term ethnography (2014-2020) across Italy and California on how researchers create knowledge about the microbiome, in a field of study known as 'metagenomics'. I will illustrate why metagenomics is best positioned within postgenomic to blend the 'molecular vision' of traditional molecular biology with an ecosystemic view. I will describe the ontoepistemic but also biographical tensions, challenges and aspirations, which ground researchers' attempts at remaking health by joining the micro with the macro scale. My argument is that metagenomics is a particularly propitious field where anthropologists and researchers can collaborate in order to configure together a new concept of health, possibly without being caught in new alluring traps, rather advancing a more promising biopolitics for both humans and non-humans