Center Seminar Series: 12:00-1:00 pm

Looping Genomes: Diagnostic Expansion and the Genetic Makeup of the Autism Population

Gil Eyal, PhD
Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology,
Columbia University

Drawing on Ian Hacking’s framework of ‘dynamic nominalism,’ we show how claims about the genetic etiology of autism played a crucial role in knitting together a bio-social community of autism parents and patients, and how these claims were also mobilized to support the diagnostic expansion of autism. We then use evidence about changes over time in autism rates in several rare ‘genomically designated’ conditions to demonstrate that these changes in diagnostic practice helped both to increase autism’s prevalence and to create its enormous genetic heterogeneity. We suggest that the history of autism thus evidences a ‘looping’ process in which genetic knowledge interacts with the ‘kinds of people’ it delineates in ways that ‘loop’ or modify both over time. (Prof. Eyal’s collaborator in this work is Dan Navon, PhD, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of California, San Diego.)

Board Room #6601
New York State Psychiatric Institute
1051 Riverside Drive, New York, NY 10032