Infertile Environments: Epigenetic Toxicology and the Reproductive Health of Chinese Men

Abstract

What does the wide-scale environmental contamination poisoning China's water, air, and food mean for our understandings of science, kinship, and reproduction in the twenty-first century? In this slim monograph, University of Arizona anthropologist Janelle Lamoreaux combines traditional laboratory ethnography with extensive reading of scientific and popular literature to argue that a distinctively Chinese variety of “epigenetics” might be able to answer this question. For the uninitiated, epigenetics—the study of how an organism's DNA can be modified by its environment, sometimes in inheritable ways—has in the last decade or so become one of the hottest topics in contemporary biology. Although a handful of anthropologists and science studies scholars have begun to examine and critique the practice and implications of epigenetic research, Lamoreaux's book is the first full-length ethnography to focus exclusively on the production of epigenetic knowledge.1 That she does so by drawing upon research conducted in Nanjing, China, feels almost incidental to her argument, however, which is clearly geared more toward anthropologists of science and science studies scholars than China studies scholars. As such, Lamoreaux's findings have important implications for how social science scholars understand epigenetic research but are unlikely to offer a great deal of novel insight for scholars of China.The crux of Lamoreaux's argument is that while scholars have rightfully critiqued epigenetics researchers in North America and Europe for viewing the influence of the environment on human biology largely through a narrow lens of individual responsibility and (epi)genetic determinism, this critique does not apply well to at least some researchers outside of Euro-American scientific power structures. In the Chinese setting, researchers instead are embedded in a broader social structure and cultural milieu that recognizes and embraces the permeability of the human body and the multiplicity of environments that can and do shape it. Thus, while they reproduce certain discourses of reductionism, their understanding of epigenetic phenomena created by toxic environments is much more nuanced and takes into account political, economic, and ecological environments, as well as kinship networks, food chains, and the environment of the laboratory itself. The result is a less narrow interpretation of epigenetics than anthropologists and other social scientists tend to give scientists credit for. This interpretation in turn opens up radical possibilities for epigenetics to become a truly “social” science.Lamoreaux makes her argument through an examination of five types of environments (环境) that the scientists she studied recognize as important: national, hormonal, dietary, maternal, and laboratory. Although she recognizes the degree to which these different environments actually operate simultaneously, each is separated out for the purpose of her analysis and given its own chapter. The five main chapters are followed by a coda and an epilogue, which do a fine job of providing a disclaimer for her argument—namely, that events both in the lab and in the author's own life that transpired after the main text was completed reinforced a somewhat narrower view of epigenetic responsibility as an intergenerational burden borne primarily by natal mothers. These disclaimers leave the reader feeling somewhat uncertain about what they should really take away from the text, however. This is particularly the case given that the final chapters feature some of Lamoreaux's finest writing in a book otherwise weighed down by excessively detailed and dry accounts of quotidian laboratory minutiae. Her account of her own harrowing experience with intergenerational responsibility for toxic environments in the early days of her first child's life is moving and powerful in ways that left this reader wishing we had seen some more of that passion and dynamism earlier in the book.Lamoreaux's ethnographic research was conducted in a single Nanjing laboratory in 2011. The laboratory and its inhabitants are rendered in rich detail, but for all the author's discussion of the importance of environments, we learn little of the broader city environment beyond the walls of the lab during this time. Still less do we learn of most of the laboratory workers’ own families or histories, which makes it somewhat difficult to evaluate the source of their open-mindedness, beyond their embeddedness in a cultural tradition that recognizes what Lamoreaux, following the anthropologist Mei Zhan, calls an “analytic of oneness” (33). Lamoreaux's explication of the importance of the “analytic of oneness” for Chinese understandings of epigenetics—the idea that bodies and their environments are really one, that nonhuman and human elements of the environment are both important, and that kinship ties are critical parts of this environment as well—is the most exciting contribution of her work. If the environment and the body are one and the same, then epigenetics is not just about individual DNA mutations caused by a toxic environment. Instead, it represents a way of scientifically representing the analytic of oneness as a truth that goes beyond Chinese medicine or the Chinese context.These are novel ideas that have the potential to expand how anthropologists and science studies scholars understand the work that laboratory scientists do and to contribute to the important project of decolonizing the social scientific study of global science. The book's narrow scope and limited ethnographic evidence do not allow these ideas to quite reach their potential, however. The hope is that Lamoreaux will find ways to push these ideas further with a more ambitious project and more rigorous ethnographic research in the future.

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