Molecolarizzare la vita: il ritorno del sociale in biologia, medicina, chimica e tossicologia
Panel 15 / Quarto Convegno Nazionale SIAC “Il ritorno del sociale”, Sapienza Università di Roma, 21-22-23 settembre 2023
Proponenti: Roberta Raffaetà (Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia), Giorgio Brocco (Università di Vienna)
Discussant: Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Columbia University)
Abstract
Nel 2005 Kapferer lamentava un ‘retreat of the social’ ma proprio in quegli anni il sociale irrompeva nelle scienze della vita. Il nuovo millennio ha visto l’emergere della postgenomica, ovvero lo studio delle influenze socio-ambientali sul profilo genomico di umani e non-umani. Ciò ha avuto ampie ripercussioni anche nel dibattito antropologico, dando rinnovato vigore alla diatriba sul rapporto tra natura e cultura e alle discussioni circa le basi socio-politiche degli agenti chimici. L’antropologia ha registrato le nuove potenzialità, ma anche i limiti e le ambivalenze politiche di tali linee di ricerca. Questo panel discuterà i legami che connettono l’antropologia allo studio della postgenomica, tossicologia e chimica nell’ambito sia della salute umana che ambientale, rintracciando in che maniera questi campi di studio si siano modificati e ibridati nel loro incontro/scontro. È possibile o desiderabile integrare i dati ‘sociali’ a quelli ‘biologici’ e ‘ambientali’? Perché e come? In che modo si muovono questi dati e le relative infrastrutture tecnologiche all’interno di un mondo caratterizzato da diseguaglianze sociali, politiche, razziali e di genere? Quali rapporti si stabiliscono tra ricercator@ del sociale e della vita e quali fattori determinano queste relazioni (finanziamenti, discipline, gerarchie, generazioni, politiche, etc.)? Cosa ci possono dire ‘contesti altri’ circa le ontologie relative al rapporto umano/non umano? E come tali rapporti vengono visualizzati?
Keywords: postgenomica, tossicologia, biologia, salute umana e ambientale, biosociale
Lingue accettate: Italiano / English
Sessione I
Venerdì 22/9/2023, ore 9.00-10.45, aula Morghen, Terzo piano
Giuseppina Pellegrino (giuseppina.pellegrino@unical.it) (Università della Calabria), Molecular (In)Visibility and Technoscientific Infrastructures: an Autoethnographic Account
This contribution draws from an autoethnography of illness and treatment of a very aggressive Non Hodgkin Lymphoma (DHL – Double-Hit Lymphoma) misdiagnosed in 2013, then correctly identified and successfully treated in 2015. This pathology, discovered in 2008 and re-classified by WHO in 2016, represents a good example of how availability of molecular biology techniques such as FISH, innovated diagnostic processes in oncology and other branches of medicine. My clinical history/illness story show how the missed or successful integration/entanglement of such techniques into broader social and technoscientific infrastructures can make a literal dfference between life and death. Chromosomic translocations differentiate DHL from DLBCL (Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphomas), then the in-visibility of specific molecules (depending from technoscientific infrastructures) enable or disable more or less adequate trajectories of therapy, treatment and organizational arrangements. Crucial issues emerge: if and when technoscience is strongly connected to clinical practice, so to integrate infrastructures of research and care, the result is a virtuous circle. Outside of this integration is the realm of protocol-based medicine, where uneven availability of advanced laboratory infrastructures, as well as sclerotized organizational routines can hinder the personalization of diagnosis and treatment, revealing deep inequalities and hidden asimmetries still to be addressed in the post genomic context.
Miriam Castaldo (miriam.castaldo@gmail.com) (Istituto Nazionale Salute Migrazioni e Povertà), Di ceppi, di sequenziamenti e di mondi invisibili: le vie meticce della tubercolosi
Nel 2018 il dipartimento di microbiologia dell’ospedale franco-musulmano di Avicenne – ubicato nel dipartimento della Seine Saint-Denis, a Parigi – istituzione pubblica legata storicamente a l’immigrazione coloniale francese, ha sollecitato all’Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, in particolare all’IRIS (Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux) l’aiuto dell’antropologia per dare conto di una serie di aspetti che riguardavano i loro pazienti migranti affetti dalla malattia della tubercolosi. Ciò che volevano approfondire riguardava una fotografia eclatante: nel dipartimento della Seine-Saint-Denis le persone di nazionalità straniera erano più colpite dalla tubercolosi rispetto a quelle di nazionalità francese; con un’incidenza addirittura tre volte superiore al tasso nazionale rispetto agli altri dipartimenti. È così che, attraverso una serie di interessi, reti e competenze, ho iniziato a occuparmi di malattia e di infezione tubercolare, a mettere in piedi una ricerca di antropologia medica e a inserirmi in un progetto multidisciplinare in collaborazione con clinici, genetisti e microbiologi, che aveva il fine di far comunicare le informazioni contenute nel genoma dei ceppi isolati da pazienti affetti da TBC con i percorsi e con le storie migratorie, con le detenzioni, le torture e le violenze, le povertà e le disuguaglianze, dai paesi di origine a quelli di approdo.
Marta Scaglioni (marta.scaglioni@unive.it) (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), “Thinking with microbes”: how microbiome research is recasting issues of ethnicity and identity in Tunisia
The computational study of the human microbiome – the genetic analysis of the bacteria, viruses, fungi, and other living entities on and within human bodies, in gut, skin, genitals – was born as a Global North scientific endeavour and is progressively moving to other parts of the world. In Africa, the study of host-microbe relations has a long-standing tradition of sampling data but suffers from research gaps when it comes to leadership and funding. Moreover, African microbiome is not homogenously studied: North Africa has only recently entered microbiome researches thanks to EU-funding schemes. Drawing from an in-depth ethnographic study of a research lab in Tunisia, this presentation wishes to highlight how issues of ethnicity and identity are mobilized among Tunisian scientists to attract (EU) foreign investments, technologies, and capacity building programmes. It wishes to highlight how the discourse on the human microbiome integrates biological data with local understandings of genealogy, ethnicity, and identity. The contribution argues that, on the one side, microbes inhabit racialized bodies, and, on the other, microbiome knowledge has the potential to transform notions of social cohesion and biosocial identities through epigenetic thinking.
Luisa Enria (luisa.enria2@lshtm.ac.uk) (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine); Umberto Pellecchia (Umberto.Pellecchia@brussels.msf.org) (Médecins Sans Frontières), (Re)imagining ‘The Social’ in Epidemic Response: Reflections from Humanitarian Medicine
The last decade has seen significant developments in efforts to prevent and respond to epidemics. Hopes for containing health emergencies are embodied by techno-scientific promises, from mRNA vaccines to genomic sequencing. Alongside these breakthroughs, there are renewed calls for integrating the social in epidemic control. This has resulted in increased involvement of anthropologists in emergency health responses and efforts to develop community-led approaches to complement biomedical interventions. In this paper, we reflect on ethnographic encounters as anthropologists in and of humanitarian health, to trace how the social has been (re)imagined in moments of crisis and the limits and possibilities of meaningful epistemological and ontological integration between the social and life sciences. We do this through two case studies. The first considers negotiations over how the social is/ should be defined and acted on during outbreak responses. This focuses on how notions like ‘culture’, ‘context’ and ‘community’ are rendered in operational plans and how ‘social data’ is received and operationalised. The second case turns to interdisciplinary collaborations and the fraught role of the ‘social’ in the co-development of scientific protocols – in terms of the social implications of research (e.g. of genomic sequencing tracing epidemic roots to survivors) and tensions between ‘cultures of evidence’ when bringing together anthropological, community and epidemiological knowledge.
Aminata C. Mbaye (Cecile.MBaye@uni-bayreuth.de) (Università di Bayreuth); Giorgio Brocco (giorgio.brocco@univie.ac.at) (Università di Vienna), Il composto della discordia: Tossicità, genere e salute intono al clordecone in Martinica
Il clordecone, o kepone, è un composto organoclorurato che è stato ampiamente utilizzato nei dipartimenti francesi d’oltremare della Martinica e della Guadalupa per combattere il tonchio del banano dal 1973 al 1993. Nelle due isole caraibiche, crescenti dibattiti politici e pubblici, sostenuti da organizzazioni e attivisti, hanno messo in evidenza la tossicità del clordecone e di altri prodotti fitochimici, successivamente utilizzati in agricoltura. Secondo gli ambientalisti, le molecole del composto sono la causa principale dell’alta incidenza di disabilità cognitiva infantile, cancro e malattie croniche nella popolazione. Partendo dal recente interesse antropologico ed intellettuale riguardo le forme sociali, simboliche e materiali della tossicità, questa presentazione si propone di condurre un esame delle molteplici ecologie di sostegno e delle pratiche discorsive emerse in Francia e Martinica intono al clordecone. Dalla nostra ricognizione etnografica e dall’analisi critica delle forme narrative emerge che le modalità attraverso cui il composto organoclorurato è stato descritto ed ‘agito’ dai media, dal mondo scientifico/medico, dalle istituzioni francesi, dagli attivisti ambientali e dalla popolazione in Martinica richiamano le molteplici relazioni ‘tossiche’ che hanno caratterizzato la storia, le vicissitudini sociali, le relazioni di genere, la salute e le vite delle persone nelle piantagioni-mondo della regione caraibica nel passato come oggigiorno.
Sessione II
Venerdì 22/9/2023, ore 11.15-13.00, aula Morghen, Terzo piano
Valentina Marcheselli (vale.marcheselli@unive.it) (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), “The unseen majority”: microbial abundance in the Anthropocene
Together with biology and medicine, another scientific discipline in which the social has appeared with its disruptive force is geology. From the early 2000s, the term Anthropocene has been mobilized by scientists and social scientists alike to describe the relentless force with which the Anthropos is shaping the planet itself, engraving its presence in the rock record. At the same time, we learn that the Anthropos is far outnumbered by microbes. New sequencing technologies reveal their ubiquity and overabundant presence in every wrinkle of the planet. Invisible at the naked eye, microbial cells outweigh human cells even in the human body itself. The “unseen majority” (Whitman et al. 1998) has been described as a driving force in the planetary evolution as well as the key to understand any other living organism. These two narratives – that of a planet disfigured by human induced change and that of a microbial abundance – coexist in a never-ending tension, redefining human-microbial interactions at the planetary level. In this presentation, I look into the emergence of new environmental microbiology approaches to interrogate the interface between these two narratives, focusing on how they contribute to redrawing the contours of what counts as planet, health and possibility of action across spatial and temporal scales.
Victor Secco (victor.secco@unive.it) (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia), Sampling with the samplers: ethnographic and big data collection practices
For all changes biosciences have gone through in the past decades, one aspect remains central yet not always visible: sampling. Without the properly collected material from the bodies and environments under study it would not be possible to produce any form of science in laboratories, papers, and conferences. Metagenomics allied with AI have provided the possibility to analyse large amounts of biological data, and in order to produce big data for environmental metagenomic analysis, big sampling expeditions are required. Based on ongoing fieldwork among field scientists in an expedition to collect environmental samples, this paper proposes to explore ethnographically a possibility of relating anthropology and biosciences in the field. Reflecting on participant observation I think about the role of the anthropologist amid biologists, sampling with and the samplers at the same time. I suggest an ethnography of data collection in biosciences is an opportunity to reconsider how anthropological and biological collection practices and data might be correlated and co-created. Following from the ethnography of sampling in environmental biosciences, this paper speculates on the possibility and desirability of integrating social and biological data, thinking about the challenges and potentials that sampling with the samplers might offer. I consider possibilities to bridge big data driven postgenomic biology and qualitative ethnographic research.
Stefano Canali (stefano.canali@polimi.it) (Politecnico di Milano); Sabina Leonelli (University of Exeter), Which Integration for Health? Comparing Integrative Approaches for Epidemiology
The need to integrate social and biomedical aspects of health and thus related methods, data, and knowledge has recently led to new concepts and notions, which frame relations between health and the environment and define different modes of integration. In this paper, we present a philosophical discussion of the epistemic role of such concepts in epidemiology, as one of the areas of biomedical research that is particularly and traditionally focused on the integration between the social and the biomedical. We focus in particular on the exposome, a notion aimed at capturing all the exposures that individuals and populations experience; planetary health, a conceptualisation of the impact of local and multispecies environments on human health; and global health, a concept aimed at framing the health of populations as the result of different social factors of different and diverse populations. In analysing these concepts, we apply a specific methodological focus by looking at data integration – the ensemble of data practices aimed at using different types and bodies of data for the study of specific phenomena. This focus enables us to identify assumptions and commitments, as well as merits and limitations of these notions as different modes of selection and integration of data, with a specific focus on issues connected to reductionism, gaps and data shadows, and varying approaches towards data quality.
Lucilla Barchetta (lucilla.barchetta@unive.it) (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia/NICHE), Data Integration As Testing Ground For Multidimensional Visions Of Health. What is it that like?
In this paper, I analyse the contribution of anthropology to multidisciplinary research teams whose aim is to operationalise multidimensional visions of health via data integration. These visions have prominently entered social, political and biomedical debates. Their circulation has signalled the necessity to integrate perspectives that look at the social-biological interactions that characterise health issues ranging from antimicrobial resistance, pollution and infectious diseases. They are also restructuring lines of research with significant epistemological consequences and exceptional methodological challenges. The development of projects that support these visions requires the coordination of diverse scientific subjects, interests, and expertise in association with a variety of data types and institutional infrastructures. I will focus primarily on data integration as an empirical ground to examine what does entail to expand notions of health beyond the human in multidisciplinary collaborative arrangements. Drawing on ethnographic field research conducted across digital sites of data-driven collaboration, I will focus on the transformation of multidimensional notions of health into methodological/collaborative projects. I will reflect on how the engagement with ethnography’s excess of description can contribute to the operationalisation of multidimensional visions of health, as well as to the understanding of data epistemologies and infrastructures that underpin them.
