The Diversification of Health: Politics of Large-Scale Cooperation in Nutrition Science (Science Studies)

Complex problems and ambitious goals are often thought to become easier by enlarging and diversifying the group of experts dealing with them. As a result, these complex entities are fragmented into smaller ones that can be dealt with by single laboratories. Bart Penders ventured into nutrition science to observe and join teams of scientists to find out what happens to these problems and goals. He attended conferences and workshops and worked in their laboratories. He shows that scientists mobilise everything in their power to solve problems: they reconstruct elements of the problem, such as our health. In the process, the search for health has led to its diversification. Contents Preface 1. Making Knowledge and Norms in Large Scale Science: The Case of Nutrigenomics 1.1. Big Science on the Agenda 1.2. Size is not the Issue 1.3. Entangled Science on the Agenda 1.4. Solving big Problems 1.5. Politics of Problem Solving 1.6. Nutrigenomics: the Case of Contemporary Nutrition Science 1.7. Structure of the Book 2. Navigating Large-Scale Research Practice 2.1. Studying Large-Scale Science 2.2. Entering and Charting the complex Field of Nutrigenomics 2.3. Particularities of Ethnography 2.3.1. The Outsider as Insider 2.3.2. Two Narratives on Interaction 2.4. Understanding Interaction as reciprocal Sensitisation 3. Making Large-Scale Nutrigenomics Work 3.1. The Birth of the Gut Health Programme 3.2. From Paper to Practice 3.3. Doability in Large-Scale Science 3.4. Food Industry as a Modular Adhesive 3.5. Sizing up Science to achieve Doability? 3.6. Health and Nutrition: making them doable; making them molecular 4. Walking the Line between Lab and Computation in Nutrition Science 4.1. Disciplines and Interdisciplinarity 4.2. From Paradigms to Styles of Science 4.3. Bittersweet Cooperation between ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ 4.4. The Power of Maps 4.5. Bridging and Redrawing the Boundary 4.6. Multiple Healths from multiple Styles 5. Personalised Nutrition. Is it doable? 5.1. The Promises of Personalised Nutrition 5.2. The Doability of Personalised Nutrition 5.3. Individual and Group Nutrition: an Inconsistency? 5.4. Why Doability matters to ELSI 6. Politics of Large-Scale Nutrition Science 6.1. Learning from Large-Scale Nutrigenomic Research 6.1.1. A Network of Doabilities 6.1.2. The Size and Entanglement of Science 6.2. Towards a Molecularisation of Health? 6.3. Doability to Nutrigenomicists and ELSI Researchers References About the author Complex problems and ambitious goals are often thought to become easier by enlarging and diversifying the group of experts dealing with them. As a result, these complex entities are fragmented into smaller ones that can be dealt with by single laboratories. Bart Penders ventured into nutrition science to observe and join teams of scientists to find out what happens to these problems and goals. He attended conferences and workshops and worked in their laboratories. He shows that scientists mobilise everything in their power to solve problems: they reconstruct elements of the problem, such as our health. In the process, the search for health has led to its diversification. Nutrition Science,Politics,Policies,Normative Effects,Health,Science,Sociology of Science,Policy,Medicine,Sociology Biographical note: Bart Penders (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher in Science & Technology Studies. He studies the normative effects of large-scale science and the co-evolution of facts, knowledge and norms