Gesellschaftswissenschaften
Fachbereich 03

Prof. Dr. Mike Fortun
Department of Science and Technology Studies,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA

“Care/Souci/Pflege of the Data, Amazement, and the Impossible Sciences of GeneXEnvironment Interactions in Asthma (Promising Genomics V. 2)”

Wann: Mittwoch, 20. Juni 2012, 14 c.t.

Wo: Campus Bockenheim, Neue Mensa NM 120

Abstract:

This presentation uses recent developments in asthma genomics to elaborate qualities of “care” in genomics today: the love of data, the worry over its creation and analysis, the laborious investment in collective infrastructure, and the cultivation of scientific subjects appropriately anxious about genomic truths. I give a partial genealogy of asthma genetics, and its rapid transformation from a search for single-gene determinants in the 1990s, through the genome wide association studies of today, to still-emerging gene-environment interaction studies. Such studies are widely acknowledged by all of their multi/inter/transdisciplinary participants as extremely difficult, with uncertain protocols and even more uncertain prospects for success. Some of this difficulty and uncertainty is ascribed to overinvestment in the genomics technical infrastructure, and underinvestment in exposure science infrastructure. It is also the case that the scientific demands alone are extremely high – so much so that I experiment here with describing them as impossible, to see where such a conceptualization might take us. The care enacted by genomicists tending their excessive databases, articulating new judgments about the outputs of algorithms, and painstakingly cajoling (non-)asthmatics into study cohorts and the ever-emergent experimental systems of ultra-high-throughput genomics – this care promises creation (Isabelle Stengers) of unprecedented (Hans-Jorg Rheinberger) matters and events.

Juniorprofessur für Soziologie mit dem
Schwerpunkt Wissenschaftssoziologie
Prof. Dr. Susanne Bauer