Integrative approaches to exposome research: Epistemological and practical issues 

Seminar theme: "The limits of integration ambition".

The exposome: epistemological issues in health-environment integration

The exposome promises to complement the genome and broaden our understanding of disease etiology. The stated aim is to adopt a global, integrative perspective on all environmental exposures, thus going beyond the geno-centric perspective and the "exposure-by-exposure" study, which are proving their limitations. However, the promise of more precise exposure measurement thanks to omics technologies, as well as greater integration of the data, methods and disciplines involved, needs to be questioned from an epistemological point of view. At the crossroads of philosophy of science, epistemology and health geography, this presentation examines the challenges of integration - which means going further than interdisciplinarity? - within the exposome and the problems 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 UMR Territoires. His research analyzes socio-spatial inequalities in health and the actions that can be taken to reduce them, with a particular focus on the issues of spatial justice associated with the development of innovations in a context of transitions. In particular, he has published a geographical classification at commune 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 is a Doctor of Philosophy (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 2019) and Research Director at the CNRS and Director of the Institut d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques (IHPST UMR 8590). Her research focuses on concepts central to biology, such as chance and probability, heredity and epigenetics, and particularly on their use in evolutionary theory. More recently, her work focuses on the plurality of conceptions of the environment in the biomedical and social sciences studying environmentally-induced diseases. Since 2018 she has been President of the Society for the Philosophy of Science (SPS). In 2019, she was awarded the Bronze Medal of the CNRS. She has published the book Mutations et aléas: le hasard dans la théorie de l'évolution with Editions Hermann, 2013. She also co-edited, with Thierry Hoquet, the Précis de philosophie de la biologie published by Editions Vuibert in 2014. For further information.

Elodie Giroux is a university professor of philosophy of science and medicine at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University and a researcher at the Institut de Recherches Philosophiques de Lyon (IRPhil). Her work falls within the field of philosophy of medicine and public health, and is rooted in the philosophy of epidemiology. His work focuses on the relations and tensions between individual and population levels in the construction of health knowledge and practices. His main publications have focused on the epistemology and history of modern epidemiology, the definition of health and disease (notably 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 on Academia or HAL) and editorships of special journal issues on these subjects, his latest book co-edited with C. Gauld and S. Demazeux: Promesses et limites de la psychiatrie de précision (Hermann, 2023).