Event 2: The Construction of the Environment in Epigenetics Research: a Social Science Study
13 May 2018
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| Dr. Clémence Pinel in London |
I attended this lecture, a part of the 2018 EpiDaPo Lecture Series, which focuses on the modern effects in molecular biology labs, start-ups, and government to explore the gene-environment interaction but also to address issues including health and illness, normal and deviant behaviors, and politics and social justice. Dr. Clémence Pinel was the speaker, and she is from King’s College London, in the UK. Her talk was in a tiny area in the Life Sciences Building and my friend and I stood in the back of the very crowded but interested room. Her research is on two different labs and the work they were doing to cross different disciplines in terms of collaboration to create mutual gain. She really expanded on the ideas of how different benefits in the labs can secure assets outside the traditional role labs utilize; finding data, expertise, or technologies in these collaborations.
She began her lecture talking about how the environment can help secure funding for some labs. Some labs, like smoking labs, have a higher ability for publication opportunities and this is due to the fact that smoking studies provide very visible and notable results, which makes publication and even believability for the general public easier to attain. She really highlighted the three main collaboration necessities, which were profitability, mobility and versatility. Research collaborations create a resource which allow more versatility and mobility to be created. In addition to this, diverse portfolios and exchanging of resources help the environment of the labs improve by increasing all three necessities. This increase gives the labs access to higher end technological facilities, which in turn allows the labs to outsource data production to external companies.
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| Discussion on Research Implications of Collaboration |
The lecture continued by emphasizing the fact that collaborations enhance versatility. This in turn allows them to find new uses for the research being done and gain different types of capital for funding. This funding is a very important aspect to the collaboration because the combination of multiple disciplines would hopefully give way to better experimentation and more fruitful results. Current research could also be used to study other experiments in different labs, and this cross-discipline collaboration creates an increase in versatility.
I really enjoyed the example she used toward the end of her lecture which brought these ideas together. The example was sharing two different environments like early life vs adult subjects in two different labs to collaborate findings, which would maybe help the early life or adult lab in their different studies and improve the value of both labs. I thought this was a truly fascinating discussion, and one that could apply to my own future research practices. I also thought the discussion tied in with the medical technology lecture we had in class. Since the labs being compared were doing medical type research in most cases. I believe medical experimentation could be improved greatly with the ideas brought up by Dr. Clémence Pinel, and that medical art and technology is really on the cusp of change in our modern world. Collaboration could even be extended to the artistic field to gain profitability, mobility and versatility for medical research. I could especially see more funding being applied to research if more artistic endeavors were seen to be crossing into the research field. This is why this lecture series was so interesting and why I highly recommend to my fellow classmates to attend the other talks this quarter.
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| My Friend and I at the Lecture Series |
References
Pinel, Clemence. “The Construction of the ‘Environment’ in Epigenetics Research: A Social Study.” The UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, socgen.ucla.edu/events/the-construction-of-the-environment-in-epigenetics-research-a-social-study/.
Warwick, Kevin. “Home.” Kevin Warwick, www.kevinwarwick.org/.
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