Fellows

Beyond Genomics. The Recent History of High-Throughput Research Cultures in the Life Sciences

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The project addresses the history of contemporary life-sciences in terms of the emergence of diverse but connected high-throughput research cultures. Accounts of post-genomic research have emphasized conceptual or socio-political reconfigurations. This project will highlight research practices, the traditions they draw on, and the new standards of knowledge-making they establish. Scholars who have analyzed post-genomic research in this way have focused on data practices. Instead, I will re-direct attention to technologies of data-production. For this purpose, I will re-conceptualize the notion of research cultures from science studies: cultures emerge through the development, dissemination, and interconnection of research approaches, understood as alignments of problems and methods. From this theoretical vantage point, I will look at how high-throughput cultures in fields other than genomics (e.g., proteomics) formed and how the fields relate, historically and in contemporary research.

CV

Robert Meunier studies the history and epistemology of the life sciences. The focus is on scientific practices and narratives. Most recently, he worked at the University of Lübeck (Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies) in the context of the Cluster of Excellence Precision Medicine in Chronic Inflammation. He was a visiting postdoctoral fellow in research group Practices of Validation in the Biomedical Sciences at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. In 2012, Robert graduated from the PhD program Foundations of the Life Sciences and their Ethical Consequences (University of Milan and European School of Molecular Medicine, Italy). Since then, he has held fellowships and positions at the MPIWG, the ICI Berlin, LMU Munich (History), the University of Kassel (Philosophy), and in the Narrative Science Project at the LSE, UK. From 2018–21 he was Principal Investigator in the DFG-funded project Forms of Practice, Forms of Knowledge (Kassel).

Publications

»Who Is a Hunter-Gatherer? Anthropological Concepts and Their Use in Microbiome Research«, in: I. Bartram, N. Ellebrecht, V. Lipphardt, T. Plümecke, J. Reardon, A. zur Nieden (eds.), The Order of People: Contesting Bio-Scientific Human Classifications, Bielefeld: Transcript 2025 (forthcoming).

with Christian Herzog, »Omics and AI in precision medicine: Maintaining socio-technical imaginaries by transforming technological assemblages«, in: TATuP – Journal for Technology Assessment in Theory and Practice 32(3), 2023, pp. 48–53.

»Gene«, in: E. N. Zalta and U. Nodelman (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2022/entries/gene/

»Approaches in Post-Experimental Science. The Case of Precision Medicine«, in: Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 45, 2022, pp. 373–383.

with Saliha Bayır, »Metagenomics approaches in microbial ecology and research for sustainable agriculture«, in: TATuP – Journal for Technology Assessment in Theory and Practice, 30(2), 2021, pp. 24–29.