Paper short abstract:

In science and policy, aging is increasingly debated not only in terms of life span, but also in terms of health span. Epigenetics points to early life experiences as key factors for health span. I explore how such insights shape notions of aging as biosocial and milieu-specific in aging research.

Paper long abstract:

In science and health policy, aging is increasingly debated not only in terms of life span (years lived), but also in terms of health span (years lived in good health). Epigenetic studies now point to early life experiences and exposures as key factors shaping health span. This paper investigates how such new insights from epigenetics are received and negotiated in an aging research consortium. Based on observation, interviews and document analysis, it shows how epigenetics becomes part of a reformulation of aging as an assemblage of acquired and inherited disease risks, a process through which aging is implicitly rendered an inherently pathological phenomenon. Some disease risks particularly relevant to differential aging are increasingly considered milieu-specific, with decreasing life and health expectancies for socio-economically disadvantaged groups. Researchers' suggestions about how to close this gap, however, do not address unjust social structures but focus on information and interventions for ever-younger individuals, families and mothers-to-be. Such interventions are framed as particularly urgent as to avoid the further broadening of the morbidity gap through possible inter- and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Here we see how the specific temporalities introduced by the possibility of epigenetic inheritance shifts visions of biomedical progress further away from engaging with slow-changing macro-political structures and towards imagining and addressing the individual as the only readily accessible target for responsibilization, intervention and change. Even in this biosocial conceptualization of aging, only some aspects of the social and the biological appear as malleable and plastic, while others are framed as set and determining.