Toxicity as process: tracing a new epigenetic regime of im/perceptibility in environmental toxicology

Science and Technology Studies (STS) research has paid considerable attention to how toxicology produces knowledge on toxicity and how this knowledge has changed. For example, modern toxicological approaches of dose–response and threshold levels and genetic/genomic approaches for tracing exposure-induced DNA damage have been found to yield specific notions of toxicity. However, some of the toxicants’ latent exposure effects have remained invisible with these two established epistemic perspectives. To tackle this issue, environmental toxicologists have recently turned to environmental epigenetics, offering a promising biomolecular perspective to better understand the role of latent exposure effects on health. Analysing environmental toxicology literature on epigenetics and interviews with key researchers demonstrates how an epigenetic perspective yields a novel notion of toxicity as process. This temporal emphasis foregrounds the idea that bodies are not just exposed to toxicants but dynamically respond to the exposures they experience. In particular, environmental toxicologists draw on a specific combination of an epigenetic theory of toxicity and new but compatible methods and technologies, which establish a new epistemic understanding of toxicity. Characterising these developments as a Regime of Im/Perceptibility shows how novel regimes can emerge in both difference and continuity with prior regimes such as modern and genetic/genomic toxicology. The case study on epigenetic research in environmental toxicology adds to STS scholarship on epistemic developments in scientific fields by illuminating how a new epistemic perspective is successfully adopted while co-existing with established regimes of knowledge production in a given field.