The lecture is part of the Science Studies Colloquium Series, and is open for everyone. The lecture lasts from 14.15-15.00. Shortly after we open up for questions, comments and discussion.
Abstract: This talk analyzes how maternal bodies are situated and valenced within the field of epigenetics. Epigenetics, the study of how experiences, environments, and exposures alter gene expression, is a vibrant new area of postgenomic life sciences research. Epigenetic research on maternal effects advances a model of human inheritance and development in which the wider social and physical environment can be seen as heritable and as a determinate of future biomedical outcomes via discrete biochemical modifications introduced by the amplifying vector of the maternal body. As an epigenetic vector, the maternal body is at once a background element, a medium for the fetus. Yet it is also a “critical” developmental context in which environmental exposures are amplified, cues are transmitted, and genes are programmed. Epigenetics research situates the maternal body as a central site of epigenetic programming and transmission, and as a significant locus of medical and public health intervention. Reflection on epigenetics-based biomedical and public health interventions recommended by leading scientists suggests a need for sensitivity to how certain bodies or spaces become intensive targets of intervention when conceptualized as amplifying vectors of risk within the explanatory landscape of epigenetics.
Bio: Sarah S. Richardson is Assistant Professor of the History of Science and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. She received her Ph.D. from the Program in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. A historian and philosopher of science, her research focuses on race and gender in the biosciences and on the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. She has broad interests and expertise in the history of molecular biology, biomedicine, and genetics, the philosophy of science, science and technology studies, and feminist science studies. She is the author of Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (2013) and the co-editor of Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (2008). Website: http://scholar.harvard.edu/srichard