Precious Material

Over the past decade, the Canadian university-based Epigenetics Lab has become increasingly central to the production of knowledge about human health and development.[1] During my first visit there, Daniel, one of three technicians in the lab, is visibly stressed. He apologizes for not being more relaxed. He has been up all night worried about a shipment of biological samples sent to the lab by one of their collaborators in the United States. The shipment arrived in Canada yesterday, but is stuck at the airport. “I’ve already called Customs multiple times,” he tells me. “We’re just going to have to drive there and get it ourselves.” Within two hours, one of the other technicians returns from the airport with a small white box containing twenty-five samples of human placental tissue. The shipment is smaller than I imagined and I am initially surprised that it caused so much concern, but Daniel is noticeably relieved.

The placenta samples are part of a birth cohort study that their collaborator has been conducting for the past year. These samples will serve as a critical resource in answering questions about whether and how particular experiences and exposures during pregnancy influence children’s later health and development.

Daniel swiftly and carefully opens the box to check the samples and, when he sees they are still frozen and intact, he lets out an audible sigh of relief. “Okay,” he says, “I think everything is going to be okay.” Later he explains that “it’s a huge responsibility on our end to make sure everything goes right… some samples you can only collect once. If it’s gone, it’s gone. It’s irreplaceable. So, each one is just so precious.”

Precious. The term strikes me as meaningful, especially when thinking about human placenta.

Long ignored in the biosciences and often labeled as waste and discarded following birth in medical settings, interest in the placenta has seen a dramatic shift in biomedicine and beyond in recent years (Benirschke, 1991; Martin and Holloway, 2013). In 2014, the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) launched the first ever Human Placenta Project (HPP) with the goal of “understanding placental structure, development, and function in real time” (Guttmacher et al., 2015, p. 303). With more than $46 million in funding to date, the project aims to improve maternal and child health through explicitly studying the placenta, marking a significant shift in research priorities associated with the organ. This is in part because, “from womb to tomb,” medical professionals and scientists have come to characterize the placenta as a “window into the future health of both mom and baby,” and a key biological resource in shifting understandings of health and development today (Nelson 2015, p. S12; Cleal and Lewis, 2016; Clark, 2017; Gluckman and Hanson, 2006; Wild, 2012).

Our own research engages with human placenta samples and the birth cohort studies that collect them as one part of a larger multi-sited ethnographic study exploring the production and translation of epigenetic knowledge related to children’s health across laboratories, communities, and clinics in the United States and Canada. Environmental epigenetics focuses broadly on how social forces including pollution, nutrition, stress, trauma, and care can become molecularly embodied, alter gene expression without changing DNA sequence, and influence the health of individuals, their offspring, and even future generations (Landecker and Panofsky, 2013). Scientific publications and popular news stories often describe epigenetics as the science of how “experience gets under the skin,” providing a powerful narrative of how social life can become biologically embedded (Aristizabal et al., 2019; Heindel et al., 2016; Liboiron et al., 2018). Longitudinal birth cohort studies and the biological materials they collect provide a growing resource for understanding these molecular processes (Gibbon and Pentecost, 2019).

Here, we focus on changing meanings of the placenta within dominant scientific and medical discourse as a window into its current importance in developmental origins and epigenetic research. We then draw on our ongoing study to consider how the meanings of the placenta are stabilized through birth cohort research, and their effects for biosocial and postgenomic knowledge production today.

Changing Meanings of the Placenta

Conceptualizations of how the human placenta develops and functions have changed considerably over the course of the late 20th century. In western biomedicine, a view of the placenta as a protective barrier between the pregnant person and their offspring dramatically shifted by the 1970s (Almond and Currie, 2011). In its place, a more porous understanding of the placenta came into view, one that has become central to contemporary research. According to Martin and Holloway (2013), however, the placenta’s porosity and limited ability to protect a fetus from harmful exposures was already documented by the early 20th century. Thus, the placenta’s ‘rise and fall’ as a protective barrier, they argue, is better understood as mapping onto changing “norms regulating women’s conduct during pregnancy” over the first half of the 20th century (pp. 300-301). Nevertheless, it also took the medical and social tragedies associated with diethylstilbestrol (to reduce miscarriage) and thalidomide (to counter morning sickness) in the mid-20th century to finally overturn entrenched medical views about the placenta as barrier, and, much later, to establish drug-related policies as they relate to pregnancy (Bell, 2009). During this same era, British epidemiologist David Barker and colleagues began charting correlations between poor maternal nutrition associated with WWII wartime rations during gestation and ‘programmed’ long-term health outcomes for affected children, including increased risks of cardiovascular disease and early mortality (Barker, 1995; Barker and Osmond, 1986; Gluckman et al., 2008; Waggoner, 2017).

These events collectively shifted conceptualizations of the placenta and its connections to fetal development, pregnant peoples’ lived experiences, and later child development in meaningful ways. First, these shifts helped inform what are now considered basic “tenets” (Burggren and Mueller, 2015) of developmental biology and morphology, namely the “critical” and “sensitive” “windows of development” (McCance and Widdowson, 1974). Links between events experienced in utero and possible long-term programming effects on children’s later health also led to the establishment of new empirical fields of investigation, including the “Developmental Origins of Health and Disease” (DOHaD) (Barker, 2007). Second, the finding that chemical teratogens like diethylstilbestrol and thalidomide could cross the placental barrier and harm fetuses influenced the “endocrine disruptor hypothesis” in the 1990s, and efforts to understand how chemicals cross the maternal-fetal ‘barrier’ (Bell 2009; Christensen and Casper, 2000; Kim and Scialli, 2011). Finally, through these shifting understandings, the placenta itself has become an environmental object of growing biomedical interest. This is because new conceptualizations position the placenta’s development and functions as uniquely connected to, nested within, and dependent on multiple milieu, including the pregnant person’s environment. The idea of the placenta as an impressionable but regulatory organ has thus positioned placentas and the bodies they connect as subject to – and potentially embodying – the social in influential ways.

By focusing on the origins of health and disease during prenatal timeframes and extending their potential impacts across the life course, however, DOHaD and epigenetic findings have been critiqued for reinscribing familiar tropes of self-surveillance and anticipatory carework, particularly for expectant mothers (Maher, Fraser and Wright, 2010; Pentecost and Ross, 2019; Rapp, 1999; Richardson, 2015; Richardson et al., 2014). Medical anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars have reflected on how medical and social surveillance of the pregnant body occurs around food and nutrition (Armstrong, 2003), vitamin supplements (Al-Gailani, 2014), exercise (Dworkin and Wachs, 2004), and even the admonition to avoid pollutants, pesticides, and plastics (MacKendrick, 2014; MacKendrick and Cairns, 2018). It is within this context that social stressors that are unequally experienced, including racial discrimination (Davis, 2019; Kuzawa and Sweet, 2008), poverty (Link and Phelan, 1995), and natural disasters (Currie and Rossin-Slater, 2012) are often individualized (Pentecost and Meloni, 2018).

Basic science examining both the porosity of bodily materials like the placenta and the embodiment of in utero events can therefore reinforce the imperative of intervention and individual responsibilities, especially during early life. This is the case even as placenta research and epigenetics more broadly challenge medical and cultural concepts of bodily autonomy (Lappé, 2016; Lappé, Hein and Landecker, 2019). Rather than seeing the “mother, fetus, and placenta” as “essentially discrete,” research on the placenta positions them as intimately constituting one another (Yoshizawa, 2016, p. 83; Fannin, 2014; Maher, 2002), something the scientists we spoke with reiterated time and time again. Through placenta research, notions of immunity (immunological responses), integrity (chimerism), individual inheritance (sedimented and inscribed exposures), and even genomic stability have been thrown into flux (Blackman, 2010; Gammeltoft, 2014; Lappé and Landecker 2015; Martin, 2010; Stotz, 2008). Placenta research has thus heightened interest in the prenatal period as a window onto the future and a site of growing social and individual attention, while simultaneously attending to the complex connections between bodies and environments over time. Here, anticipatory labor for the future nevertheless remains connected to gendered responsibilities for care, even as health and development are increasingly conceptualized as contingent, relational, and biosocial phenomenon.

Today, in addition to its role in biomedical research, human placental tissue has gained prominent attention as a so-called “natural resource” in commercial markets and regenerative medicine as well (Annas 1999, p1521; Santoro, 2011). Feminist scholars have remarked on the increasing production of “biovalue” associated with the placental tissue (Waldby and Cooper, 2010). In therapeutic and regenerative medicine, placental derivatives and those from cord blood (Haw, 2015) are extracted and utilized in a wide variety of applications including blood transfusions, transplants, and wound healing (Andrews and Nelkin, 1998; Brown and Kraft, 2006; Cooper, 2006; Copeman, 2009; Franklin and Lock, 2003; Santoro, 2011). In commercial markets, including private umbilical cord blood and placenta banks, pharmaceutical companies, and the cosmetics industry, placental stem cell reserves are cryo-preserved in anticipation of potential therapies and future products (Waldby, 2006). Through these efforts, feminist scholars have noted how the afterbirth, in the form of tissue and cells, gains a newfound social and medical “mobility” as its materiality is transformed and made to traverse bodies and “multiple temporalities” across lifespans (Colls and Fannin, 2013, p.1093-1094). Thus, in both commercial and scientific instances, instantiations of biovalue in the form of products and knowledge are gendered enterprises – based on reproductive labor that produces the material substrate on which the very creation of such value depends, and on research participation and forms of care that are overwhelming performed by women (Dickenson 2007; Kent 2008; Mitchell and Waldby, 2010; Cooper and Waldby, 2014).

For epigenetic scientists, this labor also generates research materials. However, the potential to locate the effects of experiences and exposures in placental tissue, and chart the potentially lasting influences of these early events on future lives, requires study designs that extend far beyond the womb. This is one way that birth cohorts have become central technologies of postgenomic knowledge production today.

Stabilizing Epistemic Claims

To stabilize postgenomic claims about the health effects of in utero exposures and experiences through human placenta research, scientists we worked with positioned birth cohort studies as critical resources. Researchers told us these study designs were costly but important because the data gathered over time could provide a “postnatal package” of biological and social information that would help anchor epigenetic findings found in the placenta. Data collected before, during, and after birth could then be analyzed alongside placenta samples to provide evidence of whether and when experiences and exposures are biologically embodied, and their lasting influences over time.

The temporal and material dimensions of building epistemic claims through placenta samples therefore required other bodily specimens including urine, blood, saliva, and breastmilk, as well as surveys, psychosocial and demographic data, and environmental information collected during birth cohort studies. As children grew, this data provided our interlocutors clues about the relevance of epigenetic phenomena identified in placental tissues. Thus, for scientists and the clinicians who might later use their results, understanding the relevance of the placenta required seeing it in relationship toother data over time. The scientists we worked with therefore saw birth cohort studies as an opportunity to stabilize claims about the importance of both the placenta and epigenetic knowledge gained from it. But patience was critical in these efforts.

As one scientist explained, conducting epigenetic research related to health and development is a “lesson in patience” because researchers must often wait to establish meaningful relationships between early exposures and their effects. She said, “a lot of what we do, truthfully, is collect samples and bank them… because if you have to build a study each time you want to know something, it’s incredibly inefficient and wildly expensive.” Banked samples, including placental tissue, therefore provide epigenetic scientists ways back in time and into bodies, allowing researchers to mine the pastfor information about the future (Radin, 2017). Here, we see how the ongoing collection of data across the life course becomes not only an effort to trace the complex effects of embodied experiences over time, but a mode of stabilizing claims about human placenta and the sciences used to study it as well.

Conclusion

Over the past several years, the placenta has become a resource for identifying how experiences and exposures become biologically embedded. The scientists we study describe it as simultaneously providing a retrospective window into the womb, and as a biological reference point for deciphering the impacts of early life on long-term health. The placenta has thus become endowed with new status as a central, relational organ situated at the critical interface of past and future health and development. It is both prophetic and a cypher, providing clues about the future while embodying the past.

This potential, however, relies on research infrastructures that can themselves extend into the future, providing ongoing biosamples and social context that are then marshalled as a way of knowing placentas differently too. As such, longitudinal birth cohort studies provide increasingly important sites in the production of knowledge about bodies and their experiences in the world (Lamoreaux, 2020; Roberts, 2019).

As birth cohorts become central to the production of epigenetic and biosocial knowledge, the connections they make possible between early-life experiences and later-life health point to the importance of tracing their practices thoughtfully. Ethnography is critical to this project. Here we have explored the human placenta and its relationship to both birth cohorts and postgenomic knowledge production. We described how placentas are imagined and enacted as not only a connection between bodies, but as a means of understanding relationships between lives, environments, and time. The possibilities of placenta research are therefore also about the politics of embodiment – how research materials can be made to stand in for complex and deeply social processes that are unequally felt and experienced, while they sit, often frozen in time, waiting – at airports or in labs – for lives to unfold and other biological materials to substantiate them as meaningful glimpses into both the past and future.

Notes

[1] Epigenetics Lab is a pseudonym.

Funding Statement

Research reported in this publication was supported by NHGRI grant number R00HG009154. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Works Cited

Al-Gailani, Salim (2014) Making birth defects ‘preventable’: Pre-conceptional vitamin supplements and the politics of risk reduction. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. 47 (Pt. B): 278–289.

Almond, Douglas and Currie, Janet (2011) Killing me softly: The fetal origins hypothesis. Journal of Economic Perspectives 25: 153–172.

Andrews, Lori and Nelkin, Dorothy (1998) Whose body is it anyway? Disputes over body tissue in a biotechnology age. The Lancet 351: 53–57.

Annas, George J (1999) Waste and longing – The legal status of placental-blood banking. The New England Journal of Medicine 340(19): 1521-1524.

Aristizabal, Maria J, Anreiter, Ina, and Halldorsdottir, Thorhildur, et al. (2019) Biological embedding of experience: A primer on epigenetics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PNAS first published October 17, 2019 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820838116

Armstrong, Elizabeth M (2003) Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: fetal alcohol syndrome and the diagnosis of moral disorder. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Barker, David JP (1995) Fetal origins of coronary heart disease. British Medical Journal 311(6998): 171–174.

Barker, David JP (2007) The origins of the developmental origins theory. Journal of Internal Medicine 261(5): 412–417.

Barker, David JP and Osmond, C (1986) Infant mortality, childhood nutrition, and ischaemic heart disease in England and Wales. Lancet 1(8489): 1077–1081.

Bell, Susan (2009) DES Daughters: Embodied knowledge, and the transformation of Women’s Health Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Benirschke, Kurt (1991) The placenta in the context of history and modern medical practice. Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine 115(7): 663–667.

Blackman, Lisa (2010) Bodily Integrity. Body & Society 16(3): 1–9.

Brown, Nik and Kraft, Alison (2006) Blood ties: Banking the Stem Cell promise. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 18(3-4): 313–327.

Burggren, Warren W and Mueller, Casey A (2015) Developmental critical windows and sensitive periods as three-dimensional constructs in time and space. Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 88(2): 91–102.

Christiansen, Vivian A and Casper, Monica J (2000) Hormone mimics and disrupted bodies: Social worlds analysis of a scientific controversy. Sociological Perspectives 43(4): 93–120.

Cleal, Jan K and Lewis, Rohan M (2016) The placenta and developmental origins of health and disease. In: Rosenfeld, C.S. (ed) The Epigenome and Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. Boston: Academic Press.

Clark, Nigel (2017) Anthropocene bodies, geological time and the crisis of natality. Body & Society 23(3): 156–180.

Colls, Rachel and Fannin, Maria (2013) Placental Surfaces and the geographies of bodily interiors. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 45(5): 1087–1104.

Cooper, Melinda (2006) Resuscitations: Stem Cells and the crisis of old age. Body & Society 12(1): 1–23.

Cooper, Melinda and Waldby, Catherine (2014) Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Copeman, Jacob (2009) Blood donation, bioeconomy, culture. Body & Society, 15(2): 1–28.

Currie, Janet and Rossin-Slater, Maya (2013) Weathering the storm: Hurricanes and birth outcomes. Journal of Health Economics 32(3): 487–503.

Davis, Dána-Ain (2019) Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth. New York: NYU Press.

Dickenson, Donna (2007) Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dworkin, Shari and Wachs, Faye Linda (2004) “Getting your Body Back”: Postindustrial fit motherhood in Shape Fit Pregnancy Magazine. Gender and Society 18(5): 610-624.

Fannin, Maria (2014) Placental relations. Feminist Theory 15(3): 289–306.

Franklin, Sarah and Lock, Margaret (2003) Remaking Life & Death: Toward an Anthropology of Biosciences. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Gammeltoft, Tine (2014) Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Gibbon, Sahra and Pentecost, Michelle (2019) ‘Introduction: Excavating and (re)creating the biosocial; birth cohorts as ethnographic object of inquiry and site of intervention’, Somatosphere, November 14, 2019 [online]. Available at: http://somatosphere.net/2019/introduction-excavating-and-recreating-the-biosocial-birth-cohorts-as-ethnographic-object-of-inquiry-and-site-of-intervention.html/ (Accessed: 10 February 2020)

Gluckman, Peter, et al. (2008) Effect of in utero and early-life conditions on adult health and disease. The New England Journal of Medicine 359(1): 61–73.

Gluckman, Peter and Hanson, Mark A. (2006) The conceptual basis for the developmental origins of health and disease. In: Gluckman, Peter and Hanson, Mark (eds) Developmental origins of Health and Disease. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Guttmacher, Alan E., Maddox, Yvonne T., Spong, Catherine Y. (2014) The Human Placenta Project: placental structure, development, and function in real time. Placenta 35(5):303–304.

Haw, Jennie (2015) From waste to (fool’s) gold: Promissory and profit values of cord blood. Monash Bioethics Review 33(4): 325–339.

Heindel, Jerrold J, Balbus, John, Birnbaum, Linda, et al. (2016) Developmental origins of health and disease: Integrating environmental influences. Endocrinology 156(10): 3416–3421.

Kent, Julie (2008) The fetal tissue economy: From the abortion clinic to the stem cell laboratory. Social Science & Medicine 67(11): 1747–1756.

Kim, James H and Scialli, Anthony R (2011) Thalidomide: The tragedy of birth defects and the effective treatment of disease. Toxicological Sciences 122(1): 1–6.

Kuzawa, Christopher W and Sweet, Elizabeth (2008) Epigenetics and the embodiment of race: Developmental origins of US racial disparities in cardiovascular health. American Journal of Human Biology 21(1): 2–15.

Lamoreaux, Janelle (2020) ‘Toxicology and the chemistry of cohort kinship’, Somatosphere, January 17, 2020, Available at: http://somatosphere.net/2020/chemical-kinship.html/ (Accessed: 10 February 2020)

Landecker, Hannah and Panofsky, Aaron (2013) From social structure to gene regulation, and back: A critical introduction to environmental epigenetics for sociology. Annual Review of Sociology 39: 333–357.

Lappé, Martine (2016) The maternal body as environment in autism science. Social Studies of Science. 46(5): 675-700.

Lappé, Martine, Jeffries Hein, Robbin and Landecker, Hannah (2019) Environmental politics of reproduction. Annual Review of Anthropology 48: 133–15.

Lappé, Martine and Landecker, Hannah (2015) How the genome got a life span. New Genetics and Society 34(2): 152–176.

Liboiron, Max, Tironi, Manuel and Calvillo, Nerea (2018) Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world. Social Studies of Science 48(3): 331–349.

Link, Bruce G and Phelan, Jo (1995) Social conditions as fundamental causes of disease. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 35: 80-94.

Franklin, Sarah and Lock, Margaret (2003) Remaking Life & Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

McKendrick, Norah (2014) More work for mother: Chemical body burdens as a maternal responsibility. Gender & Society 28(5) 705–728.

MacKendrick, Norah and Cairns, Kate (2018) The polluted child and maternal responsibility in the US Environmental Health Movement. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44(2): 307–332.

Maher, Jane Maree (2002) Visibly pregnant: Toward a placental body. Feminist Review 72: 95–107.

Maher, Jane Maree, Fraser, Suzanne and Wright, Jan (2010) Framing the mother: childhood obesity, maternal responsibility and care. Journal of Gender Studies 19(3): 233–247.

Martin, Aryn (2010) Microchimerism in the mother(land): Blurring the borders of body and nation. Body & Society 16(3): 23–50.

Martin, Aryn and Holloway, Kelly (2013) ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’: Histories of the placental barrier. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47(pt. B): 300–310.

McCance, R. A. and Widdowson, Elsie M. (1974). Review lecture: The determinants of growth and form. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological Sciences 185(1078): 1-17.

Mitchell, Robert and Waldby, Catherine (2010) National Biobanks: Clinical Labor, risk production, and the creation of Biovalue. Science, Technology, & Human Values 35(3): 330–355.

Nelson, D. Michael (2015) How the placenta affects your life, from womb to tomb. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology 213(4): S12–S13.

Pentecost Michelle and Ross, Fiona (2019) The First Thousand Days: Motherhood, Scientific Knowledge, and Local Histories. Medical Anthropology 38(8): 747-761

Pentecost Michelle and Meloni, Maurizio (2018) The epigenetic imperative: responsibility for early intervention at the time of biological plasticity. The American Journal of Bioethics. 18:11, 60-62.

Radin, Joanna (2017) Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago.

Rapp, Rayna (1999) Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (1st edition). New York: Routledge.

Richardson, Sarah S (2015) ‘Maternal Bodies in the Postgenomic Order: Gender and the Explanatory Landscape of Epigenetics’ in Richardson, Sarah S and Stevens, Hallam (eds.) Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology after the Genome. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 210-231.

Richardson, Sarah S, Daniels, Cynthia R, and Gillman, Matthew W et al. (2014) Society: Don’t blame the mothers. Nature News 512(7513): 131.

Roberts, Elizabeth F.S. (2019) ‘Bioethnography and the birth cohort: a method for making new kinds of anthropological knowledge about transmission (which is what anthropology has been about all along)’, Somatosphere, November 19, 2019. [online] Available at: http://somatosphere.net/series/birth-cohorts-ethnographic-object/ (Accessed: 10 February 2020)

Santoro, Pablo (2011) Liminal biopolitics: Towards a political anthropology of the umbilical cord and the placenta. Body & Society 17(1): 73–93.

Stotz, Karola (2008) The ingredients for a postgenomic synthesis of nature and nurture. Philosophical Psychology 21(3): 359–381.

Waggoner, Miranda (2017) The zero trimester: Pre-pregnancy care and the politics of reproductive risk. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Waggoner, Miranda (2015) Cultivating the maternal future: Public health and the prepregnant self. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 40(4): 939–962.

Waldby, Catherine (2006) Umbilical Cord Blood: From Social Gift to Venture Capital. BioSocieties 1(1): 55–70.

Waldby, Catherine and Cooper, Melinda (2010) From reproductive work to regenerative labour: The female body and the stem cell industries. Feminist Theory 11(1): 3–22.

Wild, Christopher Paul (2012) The exposome: From concept to utility. International Journal of Epidemiology 41(1): 24–32.

Yoshizawa, Rebecca Scott (2016) Fetal–Maternal Intra-action: Politics of new placental biologies. Body & Society 22(4): 79–105.

---

Martine Lappé is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Science, Technology, and Society in the Department of Social Sciences at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is a medical sociologist and feminist science and technology studies scholar. Her research focuses on lived experiences of health, science, and medicine. She is a member of the international Biosocial Birth Cohort Research (BCCR) network and the Principal Investigator of the NHGRI-funded K99/R00 study “Behavioral Epigenetics in Children: Exploring the Social and Ethical Implications of Translation” (R00HG009154).

Robbin Jeffries Hein has a PhD in Sociology from University of California, Los Angeles. She studies the intersections of science, medicine and technology, sociology, and feminist theory. She specializes in research on the environmental and reproductive politics of health, developmental origins of disease, and environmental epigenetics. She is a member of the Behavioral Epigenetics in Children study and the BCCR network. Her current work focuses on the social and political implications of placenta epigenetics for women and children’s health.