Plastic people
Epigenetics has shown that there’s no such thing as a normal human body, so how did it get hijacked by the body police?
by Julie Guthman and Becky Mansfield
The past decade has seen an avalanche of paradigm-shattering studies in the biological, toxicological and behavioural sciences: from findings published recently in Science and in Nature showing that sperm carry the marks of a man’s trauma and undernourishment, which leads to depression and metabolic glitches in his offspring, to the steady flow of research from the lab of the reproductive biologist Michael Skinner. Skinner’s research at Washington State University shows that in-utero exposure to environmental chemicals, such as those in plastics and pesticides, affects reproductive development, obesity and a wide range of diseases in adulthood. The weight of argument behind such findings suggests a radical conclusion: namely, that the environment not only influences the human body, it comes into it, shaping what it is – and who you are.
Such thinking cuts against the grain of what we’ve always thought about the human body: that its boundary is impermeable, its integrity complete, its unity sovereign. It suggests that we humans are nothing of the sort. We are porous, changeable, plastic.
At the individual level, each of us is the unique expression of the total environment specific to our place and time: the products of our diet and nutritional status, and of the social and environmental conditions that influence it. We are shaped by, even made of the bacteria and viruses we encounter in our everyday lives, as well as a whole range of chemicals we’re exposed to through food, air, water and soil, at work, home, and in our consumer goods. We embody the stressful or stress-relieving aspects of our work and family life, socioeconomic status, racial privilege, trauma and war, and our experience of the built environment (from the stress of traffic jams to the calm of walking on the beach at sunset). And we are not only the expression of all these things in the current moment, but perhaps even more, in our past: the combined environment of our parents and grandparents is our molecular inheritance.
How might this novel understanding of biological development affect our understanding of human variation and difference? Or how we understand responsibility for biological outcomes, for example in health and disease? Evidence that we are, each of us, the crystallisation of a unique set of environmental influences suggests that responsibility for health is something dispersed across time and space, and that variation is the only possible outcome of development. Or does it? Do we see responsibility for health and disease as something collective; or do we reinforce the present obsession with individual behaviour? Do we embrace difference, or use knowledge of environmental influence to strive to achieve the ‘perfect’ human – blaming individuals when they fail to hit the mark?
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http://aeon.co/magazine/science/have-we-drawn-the-wrong-lessons-from-epigenetics/
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