May 2025 EFF: The ELSI of Social Epigenetics

At the molecular level, social epigenetics elucidates the impacts of exposure to environmental pollutants, childhood adversity, and discrimination on the human body. In turn, it also offers insight into the biological mechanisms that determine how structural forces, such as environmental policy or exposure to violence, impact individual health across generations. However, social epigenetics also has the potential to reinforce logics of genetic determinism and biological racism. On top of this, it has the complex job of disentangling the causal mechanisms at play when determining how and why exposure to one pollutant or type of experience has specific outcomes when others do not. There are also a myriad of questions about how best to translate this work into public health, policy, and clinical care. This session explored how ELSI research of social epigenetics can address these issues and make social epigenetics more impactful.

Moderator: Martine Lappé, PhD

Panelists: Michael S. Kobor, PhD, Erika A. Waters, PhD, MPH