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Short abstract:

Our paper explores how scientists mobilise clinical relevance to promote epigenetic approaches in mental health research. We demonstrate how relevance is defined and performed differently, what potential problems arise from these differences and how framework conditions contribute to these dynamics.

Long abstract:

Environmental epigenetics is a bourgeoning research approach within the life sciences accompanied by promissory rhetorics about its potential therapeutic benefits. Through a discourse analysis of scientific publications and qualitative interviews with researchers from neurosciences and molecular biology, our paper explores why approaches from epigenetics have been adopted in psychiatric research: scientists affirm three main ways of applying epigenetics, mobilising the clinical relevance of epigenetics and making it appealing to actors in applied research. As we unfold, this definition of relevance builds an essential bridge between scientists across different research fields. However, we will carve out struggles of doing relevant research in epigenetics. These struggles materialise in three points of critique the epigeneticists further towards scientists in applied fields concerning the acceptable level of uncertainty for epigenetic knowledge to be considered relevant. To sustain their promises of relevance, epigeneticists propose research consortia as a fix that, however, cannot solve fundamental epistemic problems firmly inscribed into the field’s research practices: while environmental epigenetics is hyped as a solution to public health problems, there are still too many epistemic problems in human epigenetics to deliver on this promise. The article locates these ambivalent dynamics in a fast-paced postgenomic context in which epigenetics is both presented as an innovative solution to the global mental health challenge and as a fragile knowledge domain. With our paper, we contribute to STS literature to explore how scientists attempt to do relevance within a funding landscape that incentivises quick translations rather than exploratory research.