Munich Center for Technology in Society, School of Management and School of Life Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Augustenstraße 46, 80333, Munich, Germany.
Semin Cell Dev Biol. 2020 Jan;97:189-194. doi: 10.1016/j.semcdb.2019.07.008. Epub 2019 Sep 9.
What doesit mean to inherit? Debates about the meaning of inheritance are numerous in the history and the present of the biological and the social sciences. While the majority of contributions in this special issue discuss hitherto unthought of molecular mechanisms of biological inheritance, this review explores the contested territory of inheritance from a social science perspective. Specifically, it examines contemporary biological research on epigenetic forms of inheritance in its historical and social contexts. To that end, the review explores what biology itself has been inheriting when it comes to how it considers inheritance conceptually and experimentally. I delineate three particularly important strands of inheritance: inheriting a history of eugenics; inheriting determinist reasoning; and inheriting experimental reductionism. I approach the social and scientific meaning of these inheritances by following scholars such as Donna Haraway and Jacques Derrida, who frame inheritance not as a passive occurrence but as an active process, as a task that must be undertaken by those who inherit. Such a framing raises the question of what it might mean to inherit something responsibly - particularly when what needs to be inherited is not an object but a difficult history. I argue that in order to become 'response-able' to this question, researchers who investigate biological inheritance today must engage these histories critically and review their legacies in present-day research. This is a task biologists might not want to undertake alone, but in interdisciplinary collaboration with social scientists and humanities scholars, in order to mobilize multiple forms of expertise for understanding the complex biosocial processes of human inheritance.
传承意味着什么？在生物科学和社会科学的历史和现在，关于传承意义的争论层出不穷。虽然本期特刊中的大多数文章都在讨论生物遗传迄今为止尚未被考虑的分子机制，但这篇综述从社会科学的角度探讨了传承的有争议领域。具体来说，它考察了当代生物学对表观遗传形式的传承的研究在其历史和社会背景下的情况。为此，该综述探讨了生物学在考虑遗传的概念和实验时，自身在哪些方面继承了遗传的历史。我勾勒出了三个特别重要的传承线索：传承优生学的历史；传承决定论的推理；以及传承实验还原论。我通过 Donna Haraway 和 Jacques Derrida 等学者的研究来探讨这些传承的社会和科学意义，他们将传承定义为一种主动的过程，而不是被动的发生，是那些传承者必须承担的任务。这种表述提出了一个问题，即负责任地传承某些东西意味着什么——尤其是当需要传承的不是一个物体，而是一段艰难的历史。我认为，为了对这个问题做出“回应”，今天研究生物遗传的研究人员必须批判性地研究这些历史，并在当前的研究中回顾其遗产。这是生物学家可能不想独自承担的任务，而是需要与社会科学家和人文科学学者进行跨学科合作，以便调动多种形式的专业知识来理解人类遗传的复杂生物社会过程。
