Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research at a microbiome nutrition startup, this paper shows how dietitians’ invisible affective labor mediates between microbiome data and users, sustaining personalization, the commodification of microbiome science, and the promise of AI-driven biomedicine.

Paper long abstract

Microbiome-based health products are a rapidly growing sector of the global health and wellness market, and a dynamic site of scientific, financial, and cultural interest in precision medicine. Drawing on an ethnographic study of a leading microbiome-based personalized nutrition start-up, we explore how the human gut microbiome is being commodified and negotiated in human practice. We employ a critical feminist lens to foreground the embodied and affective labors that translate microbiome science into consumer-facing services and enact ‘personalized nutrition’ as their target. Our findings highlight the largely invisible work of dietitians, who mediate between scientific claims on the gut microbiome and their imperfect realization as a consumer health application. Dietitians’ work bridges the tensions between the datafied and relational dimensions of personalized nutrition in three key respects: producing data about users, articulating the novelty and excitement of the product, and translating the microbiome into actionable, meaningful nutritional advice. These affective and conceptual achievements sustain the promise of a microbiome-based “revolution” in biomedicine and drive the increasing commodification of microbiome science. More broadly, we draw attention to the human labor, often minimized, that mediates AI-driven science in the biotech industry.