Max Planck Seminar: Laurel Raffington – Science Fiction Bioscience

Her research spans the fields of developmental psychology, public health, and genomics and seeks to understand how systems of social inequality and genetically-influenced differences between people combine to shape differential outcomes of education, health, and well-being across the lifespan and across generations.

In her latest study, she found that children from a socio-economically disadvantaged background had an epigenetic profile that had been associated with poorer health in previous studies on adults: Socioeconomic inequality in children’s epigenetics.

Abstract of her talk: Science fiction envisions future technologies, societies, and environments to explore social and ethical issues that may arise through scientific and technological progress. In this talk I aim to answer the question: how close is human genomic science to science fiction themes of genetic selection, engineering, and immortality? I introduce DNA-based measures of complex human traits (i.e. polygenic scores and methylation profile scores) that have materialized in the era of big data genome sequencing as well as efforts to modify genomic outcomes. In line with science fiction dystopias, some of this science could be applied in ways that may have unwanted side-effects or exacerbate social inequalities. Yet, unlike science fiction themes, genomic science has also reiterated the notion that genetics and environments are intricately intertwined in human development, which is marked by idiosyncrasies common to emergent systems.​