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Qualitative Sociology
Published in: Qualitative Sociology 4/2013

01-12-2013

Translating Racial Genomics: Passages in and Beyond the Lab

Author: Catherine Bliss

Published in: Qualitative Sociology | Issue 4/2013

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Abstract

While qualitative studies of science have traditionally focused on sciences as bounded cultures, or cohesive communities that operate in well-defined research settings, Actor-Network Theory (ANT) helps to envision the complex processual formation of scientific associations across a diverse array of social entities and sites. Using the case of race and health disparities research in genetic science, this article explores how ANT’s emphasis on agentic symmetry, and the translation of interests between humans and nonhumans, makes visible the multiplicity of agencies and research institutes that, guided by the US federal government’s Directive No. 15, marshaled genomics to construct race as a social problem. It also examines the multiplicity of methodological strategies such an analysis entails. Here, qualitative analysis of government regulations, policy councils, funding mechanisms, scientific practices, and statements from key scientists in elite biomedical positions is used to show how it came to be that racial governance became an “obligatory passage point” for scientists, and, in a second movement, that genomics became an obligatory passage point for conceiving large-scale analysis of racial stratification. Yet, going beyond current conceptions of ANT, I consider how tracing translation in and beyond the lab can expose a third multiplicity: the multiplicity of obligatory passage points in a given network. I argue that ANT, taken to its logical end, involves study of a plurality of mutually reinforcing actors that co-constitute one another and synergistically push collective agendas.
previous article Actor-Network Theory, Gabriel Tarde and the Study of an Urban Social Movement: The Case of Can Ricart, Barcelona
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Footnotes
1
In this article, I use the term “multiplicity” to denote the complexity of different elements of the sociology of associations. This is different from philosophical deployments that focus on matters such as the continuity and relationality of ontological kinds.
 
2
Whiteness also serves as the unmarked norm in bioethics, a key actor in the production of racial debates across biomedicine (Myser 2003).
 
3
Though “race” often refers to a classification system based on assumptions about continental differences in ancestry, and “health disparities” often refers to disparities in the quality of health and healthcare among groups such as races; following ANT, I approach these constructs as always in the process of redefinition.
 
4
Directive No. 15 was established as a government-wide set of race categories that would track minority participation in public services. It was a result of the successful gains of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
 
5
“Human population variation” can also be investigated as an actor, and potential obligatory passage point, in this network. For analysis of population genomic science reports conducted from 2000–2010, see Bliss 2012.
 
6
In op-eds, Fullwiley, Fujimura, and Rajagopalan have more fruitfully contextualized lab science (see Bolnick et al. 2007; Fujimura et al. 2008).
 
7
Due to publication constraints, I refer to the subset of discourse and research interviews that most efficiently describe this instance of translation. To learn more about trends in the discourse, the relevance of this discursive explosion for the constitution of the field, and views of individual scientists, see Bliss 2012.
 
8
In journals that did not offer a Boolean term* algorithm, I typed in “race,” “racial,” “gene,” “genetic,” “genome,” and “genomic” in the anywhere in the text search mode. I cross-performed this search through two databases: PubMed@Stanford and BIOSIS.
 
9
Medicine and public health debated the validity of racial categories throughout the second half of the twentieth century (Epstein 2007). However, it was not until 1997 that the population geneticists and genetic epidemiologists who would become the genomic field’s professional elite began participating in these debates (Bliss 2009). On genetic debates over race and health equity, see Hammonds and Herzig (2008) and Maglo (2011). On public health debates over federal racial categories, and population genetic responses see Bliss (2009), Gannett (2001), and Reardon (2005).
 
10
Also see Epstein (2007) for a history of the appearance of NIH racial debates in the field of genomics.
 
11
As project leader Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza explained it to me, they sought the biodiversity in the world population “before 1492, before the great expansions.”
 
12
To align population genomics with Directive No. 15’s continental framework, Cavalli-Sforza has since devised the analytic of “pseudo-continents” (fieldnotes 5.10.07).
 
13
Leaders of the Human Genome Project, like Craig Venter, argued: “What we’ve shown is the concept of race has no scientific basis” (Buerkle 2000).
 
14
Over time, many early naysayers have accepted a role for race in biomedicine even if not in population genomics. Yet, as gene-environment research has taken hold of public health genomics, genomicists find it harder to maintain a disciplinary boundary (Bliss 2013).
 
15
Lander affirmed this approach in a 2007 interview, in which he argued: “We know that there are regional similarities. We know that in Africa there is somewhat more variation, because all mankind comes from Africa. And so in order to get some idea whether regional variation mattered, it was useful to pick a site in Africa, a site in Europe, and a site of Asia.”
 
16
In an interview with the New York Times, Phimister voiced additional support for a study of health disparities that would put socially defined races and their disease concerns first (Wade 2002b).
 
17
In a 2007 interview, Althshuler argued for more health disparities research in genomics, expressing the sociological view that had taken hold: “Because a label can itself be the cause of that health outcome, it could be a source of discrimination or of behavior or culture, or it could be genetic.”
 
18
Later informal conversations with Goldstein elicited echoes of this position, as he suggested BiDil be made available to African Americans regardless of the genomic veracity of race.
 
19
Elsewhere, I discuss the disciplinary convergence between the genetic and social sciences (see Bliss 2012, 2013). I show how social science critics have equally promoted a “sociogenomic” model of race and health disparities.
 
20
On individual career trajectories and values, and the shortcomings of a social science genomics, see Bliss (2012).
 
21
In recent years, public health institutions such as the NIH have cut budgets as much as 5 % (Riederer 2011). However, the NHGRI has remained steady at a less than 1 % loss (Kaiser 2011). For details of how budget cuts affect the organization of the NHGRI, see NGHRI (2012).
 
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Metadata
Title
Translating Racial Genomics: Passages in and Beyond the Lab
Author
Catherine Bliss
Publication date
01-12-2013
Publisher
Springer US
Published in
Qualitative Sociology / Issue 4/2013
Print ISSN: 0162-0436
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7837
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-013-9257-5

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