Integrative approaches to exposome research: Epistemological and practical issues 

Seminar theme: “The limits of integration ambitions”

The exposome: epistemological challenges of integration in health and the environment

The exposome promises to complement the genome and broaden our understanding of disease etiology. The stated goal is to adopt a comprehensive and integrative perspective on all environmental exposures, thereby moving beyond the gene-centered perspective and "exposure-by-exposure" study, which have proven to be limited. However, the promises of greater precision in measuring exposures thanks to omic technologies, as well as greater integration of the data, methods, and disciplines involved, deserve to be questioned from an epistemological point of view. At the crossroads of the philosophy of science, epistemology, and the geography of health, this presentation proposes to examine the challenges of integration—which aims to go beyond interdisciplinarity—within the exposome and the issues associated with the articulation of often fragile knowledge in environmental health.

E. Giroux, F. Merlin, and Y. Fayet have co-edited a book analyzing the development of integrative approaches in the field of environmental health studies:Integrative Approaches in Environmental Health and Exposome Research: Epistemological and Practical Issues(Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2023).

Yohan Fayet is a geographer specializing in health issues, Junior Professor at Clermont Auvergne University, and researcher at the Territoires joint research unit. Analyzing socio-spatial health inequalities and the actions that can reduce them, his research helps to understand the spatial justice issues associated with the development of innovations in a context of transition. He has published a geographical classification at the municipal level to analyze these inequalities in metropolitan France (Beyond the map: Evidencing the spatial dimension of health inequalities. International Journal of Health Geographics, 2020).

Francesca Merlin holds a PhD in philosophy (University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2019) and is a research director at the CNRS and director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IHPST UMR 8590). Her research focuses on central concepts in biology such as chance and probability, heredity and epigenetics, and in particular their use in evolutionary theory. More recently, her work has focused on the plurality of conceptions of the environment in the biomedical and social sciences that study environmentally induced diseases. Since 2018, she has been President of the Society for the Philosophy of Science (SPS). In 2019, she received the CNRS Bronze Medal. She published the book Mutations et aléas: le hasard dans la théorie de l'évolution (Mutations and Chance: Randomness in the Theory of Evolution) with Hermann in 2013. She also co-edited, with Thierry Hoquet, Précis de philosophie de la biologie (A Summary of the Philosophy of Biology), published by Vuibert in 2014.More information.

Elodie Giroux is a professor of philosophy of science and medicine at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University and a researcher at the Lyon Institute for Philosophical Research (IRPhil). Her work falls within the field of philosophy of medicine and public health, with a focus on the philosophy of epidemiology. The general focus of her work concerns the relationships and tensions between the individual and population levels in the construction of health knowledge and practices. Her main publications have focused on the epistemology and history of modern epidemiology, the definition of health and disease (notably, the book Après Canguilhem, définir la santé et la maladie, P.U.F., 2010), precision medicine, and more recently, environmental health and the exposome. In addition to numerous articles (available onAcademiaor HAL) and special journal issues on these topics, his latest book, co-edited with C. Gauld and S. Demazeux, is Promesses et limites de la psychiatrie de précision (Hermann, 2023).