The Genomic Turn in the Social Sciences

Emily Merchant, University of California, Davis

In the fall of 2019, a New Jersey startup called Genomic Prediction announced that the first pregnancy had been achieved using embryos screened with its signature product, expanded preimplantation genomic testing, which calculates embryos’ polygenic risk scores for a number of complex diseases, such as diabetes and cancer, and for such undesirable traits as short stature and low intelligence. This controversial test was made possible by advances in a field of research that has emerged only in the last twenty years, social science genomics or sociogenomics. Although sociogenomics has come under fire for its “genes first” approach, it is actually more diverse than critics often realize, encompassing two strands that take opposing views of the causal relationship between the biological and the social. One does put “genes first,” assuming that genetic correlates of social outcomes reflect a biological basis for observed differences in such social outcomes as educational attainment, sexual activity, and political participation. The other puts genes second or third, focusing on the social determinants of health and using genotypes to control for unobserved heterogeneity and/or employing epigenetic data (e.g. telomere length, methylation) as dependent variables that can elucidate biological pathways from social causes to biological outcomes. Drawing primarily on interviews with leading sociogenomicists and their funders, this paper identifies the origins of the first strand of sociogenomics in behavior genetics and the origins of the second strand at the intersection of demography and medical sociology. It explores the collaboration between the two strands that facilitated the genome-wide association study (GWAS) of educational attainment that served as the basis for Genomic Prediction’s embryo screening, interrogating the uneasy partnership between social scientists who often share data and analytic methods but operate within very different biosocial paradigms.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 127. Expertise at the Intersection of Biology and Social Science