Sarah S. Richardson is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, jointly appointed in the Department of the History of Science and the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is the author of
Hallam Stevens is Assistant Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He is the author of
Sarah S. Richardson is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, jointly appointed in the Department of the History of Science and the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is the author of
Hallam Stevens is Assistant Professor of History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He is the author of
A distinctive individual human genome is supposed to be found in every cell of the individual to whom it pertains. This essay describes a number of postgenomic lines of research that are increasingly complicating this picture. Contemporary science is beginning to understand multicellular organisms such as ourselves as containing a multitude of distinct genomes and a diverse collection of what are standardly treated as organisms. All of these developments show, this essay argues, that the human is a fundamentally polygenomic organism. The expression “the human genome” is certainly of much more limited significance than was once thought. This perspective is crucial to understanding the growing importance for medicine of research in epigenetics, metagenomics, and other paradigmatically “postgenomic” areas of science.
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