Features

June 19, 2017

Stakes of Life: Science, states, policies, publics and ‘the first thousand days’

This article is part of the series: The First Thousand Days of Life

Welcome back to the “First Thousand Days of Life” Somatosphere series. Here we continue to explore the ways that a global health initiative driven by new findings in epigenetics and neuroscience and by a reframing of theories about health and disease in terms of developmental origins shape ideas about (global) health and population futures, invigorate campaigns, and take …

Books Features

September 21, 2016

Maurizio Meloni’s “Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics”

By Alan Goodman

Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics

Maurizio Meloni

Palgrave MacMilllan, 2016, 284 pages

In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni, one of our most insightful social theorists of contemporary biology, guides us through heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century, through the twentieth “century of the gene” (Keller, 2000) and …

Features

April 14, 2016

Sex/Gender: Part II: What’s Fixed, Changeable, Changing?

By Constance Cummings and Libby Udelson

This article is part of the series: Sex/Gender

A Critical Moment: Sex/Gender Research at the Intersections of Culture, Brain, and Behavior

FPR-UCLA 2016 Conference Summary

Part 2 of the FPR-UCLA conference on sex/gender, which was chaired by cultural anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, explored aspects of brain and behavior that are “fixed” by evolution and biology and other aspects that create, reflect, and respond to human social and cultural …

Features

March 10, 2016

Sex/Gender: Part I: Why Now?

By Constance Cummings and Kathy Trang

This article is part of the series: Sex/Gender

A Critical Moment: Sex/Gender Research at the Intersections of Culture, Brain, and Behavior

FPR-UCLA 2016 Conference Summary

Emerging theories in neuroscience – fueled by new technologies in brain imaging and recording along with torrents of new data – offer a profoundly different view of the human brain – part of a “tangled skein” of extended brain-body-behavior networks that are dynamic, …

Features

October 12, 2015

Making a Case for Reducing Pollution in China, or The Case of the Ugly Sperm

By Janelle Lamoreaux

The Chinese film, Under the Dome, tells the story of a former CCTV news anchor’s struggle to understand and deal with smog in the wake of her pregnancy and motherhood. The filmmaker and narrator, Chai Jing, makes a case for reducing pollution in China by highlighting the potential correlation between Beijing’s smog and the tumor found in her developing fetus, …

Features

March 12, 2015

Bio-ethnography, a view from philosophy

By Vivette García Deister

This article is part of the series: The collaborative turn: interdisciplinarity across the human sciences

Full frontal disclosure: I am not an anthropologist (by training). But my work is informed by historical research, ethnographic methods, and critical anthropology of science. And as someone who has –Developmental Systems Theory willing- taken on the inquiry of scientific research exploring gene-disease associations, I side with Liz Roberts’ want for a “synthetic, symmetrical analysis that understands environment-body interactions as …

Somatosphere

Science, Medicine, and Anthropology

A collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics.

Tag Archives: Epigenetics

Stakes of Life: Science, states, policies, publics and ‘the first thousand days’

Maurizio Meloni’s “Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics”

Sex/Gender: Part II: What’s Fixed, Changeable, Changing?

Sex/Gender: Part I: Why Now?

Making a Case for Reducing Pollution in China, or The Case of the Ugly Sperm

Bio-ethnography, a view from philosophy