“Passing Down Pollution”: (Inter)generational Toxicology and (Epi)genetic Environmental Health

Abstract

Concern about the harmful health effects of industrial pollution is increasingly taking on an intergenerational dimension. In environmental health sciences such as toxicology, this has resulted in emphasizing the influence of toxic chemicals, substances, and situations across generations. Toxic relationalities are now being explored through research on gene-environment interaction, including toxicogenomics and epigenetic research through animal experiments and birth cohort studies. Based on fieldwork conducted among reproductive and developmental toxicologists working in Nanjing, China, this article shows how toxicological research both expresses and produces renewed anxieties about "passing down pollution." These toxicological accounts of intergenerational harm problematically work through overly simplistic renderings of reproduction and biological relatedness. But they also have the potential to catalyze creative understandings of toxic relationalities and responsibilities at a moment when making kin is increasingly seen as key to securing livable futures. [toxicology, environment, epigenetics, kinship, China] Wang Bo, a Ph.D. student in reproductive and developmental toxicology at the Nanjing Institute of Medicine and Science (NIMS), picks up a mouse from one of five cages sitting in the corner of the laboratory where we stand. 1 He holds the mouse by the scruff of the neck and brings him to a laboratory bench. Wang Bo sits down on a stool and invites me to sit on another stool beside him to observe the experiment he will conduct today. The experiment explores whether or not "multigenerational exposures"-exposures that transmit epigenetic effects across multiple generations-contribute to reduced sperm counts or other forms of semen decline. 2 The mouse Wang Bo is now holding and will soon kill is a third generation specimen, reproduced in an effort to understand the intergenerational dimensions of toxicity and, in my interpretation, to explore how far toxic relationalities extend.Wang Bo is a member of the DeTox Lab, a group of approximately 20 reproductive and developmental toxicologists at varying levels of seniority that I studied between 2008 and 2011 as part of my research on the science of men's infertility in China. My interest in the DeTox Lab was piqued in the mid-2000s because of their

For sled dogs and women: Hormonal contraception and animacy hierarchies in Danish/Greenlandic Depo-Provera debates

“…Folketinget, 1981a). Imaginaries of cross-generational contamination produced cultural anxieties, not least about the hormonally disturbed unborn and the queering of nature -for instance, through neoformations of reproductive organs or non-normative gender performance in children (Ah-King and Hayward, 2013;Di Chiro, 2010;Lamoreaux, 2021;Roberts, 2007).…”

“…According to Danish newspapers, Petersson asserted on Greenlandic radio that ‘the birth control injection should not be used in a civilised country on a healthy population’ (Sjællands Tidende, 1988b: 3). Environmental humanities scholars have noted that advocacy for chemical detoxification does not only work to highlight the harms of pollution but also often to render specific bodies and geographies pathological (Ah-King and Hayward, 2013; Cielemęcka and Åsberg, 2019; Di Chiro, 2010; Lamoreaux, 2021; Murphy, 2017; Nunn, 2018). Similarly, in these arrangements about who should or should not be recipients of ‘The Shot’, Depo-Provera was presented as a marker of non-normality, non-civilisation, and Otherness.…”