A critical appraisal of clinical epigenetics

Enacting biosocial complexity: Stress, epigenetic biomarkers and the tools of postgenomics

This article analyses attempts to enact complexity in postgenomic experimentations using the case of epigenetic research on biomarkers of psychosocial stress. Enacting complexity in this research means dissecting multiple so-called biosocial processes of health differentiation in the face of stressful experiences. To characterize enactments of biosocial complexity, the article develops the concepts of complexity work and complexification. The former emphasizes the social, technical, and material work that goes into the production of mixed biological and social representations of stress in epigenetics. The latter underlines how complexity can be assembled differently across distinct configurations of experimental work. Specifically, complexification can be defined as producing, stabilizing, and normalizing novel experimental systems that are supposed to improve techno-scientific enactments of complexity. In the case of epigenetics, complexification entails a reconfiguration of postgenomic experimental systems in ways that some actors deem 'better' at enacting health as a biosocial process. This study of complexity work and complexification shows that biosocial complexity is hardly a univocal enterprise in epigenetics. Consequently, the article calls for abandoning analysis of these research practices using clear-cut dichotomies of reductionism vs. holism, as well as simplicity vs. complexity. More broadly, the article suggests the relevance of a sociology of complexification for STS approaches to complexity in scientific practices. Complementing the existing focus on complexity as instrumental rhetoric in contemporary sciences, complexification directs analytical attention to the pragmatic opportunities that alternative (biosocial) complexities offer to collective, societal, and political thinking about science in society.

Engram Studies: A Call for Historical, Philosophical, and Sociological Approaches

In this chapter, we identify three distinct avenues of research on the philosophical, historical, and sociopolitical dimensions of engram research. First, we single out the need to refine philosophical understandings of memory within neuroscientific research on the engram. Specifically, we question the place of constructivist and preservationist philosophical claims on memory in the formulation of the engram concept and its operationalization in contemporary neuroscience research. Second, we delve into the received historiography of the engram claiming its disappearance after Richard Semon's (1859-1918) coinage of the concept. Differently from this view, we underline that Semon's legacy is still largely undocumented: Unknown are the ways the engram circulated within studies of organic memory as well as the role Semon's ideas had in specific national contexts of research in neurosciences. Finally, another research gap on the engram concerns a socio-anthropological documentation of the factual and normative resources this research offers to think about memory in healthcare and society. Representations of memory in this research, experimental strategies of intervention into the engram, as well as their translational potential for neurodegenerative (e.g., Alzheimer's disease) and psychiatric (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder) conditions have not yet received scrutiny notwithstanding their obvious social and political relevance.All these knowledge gaps combined call for a strong commitment towards interdisciplinarity to align the ambitions of a foundational neuroscience of the engram with a socially responsible circulation of this knowledge. What role can the facts, metaphors, and interventional strategies of engram research play in the wider society? With what implications for philosophical questions at the foundation of memory, which have accompanied its study from antiquity? And what can neuro- and social scientists do jointly to shape the social and political framings of engram research?