From Cells to Society and Back Again (WP-20-12)
Thomas McDade and Kathleen Mullan Harris
A new generation of population-based research is combining measures of social context, experience, and behavior with direct measures of physiology, gene sequence and function, and health. Studies drawing on models and methods from the social and biological sciences have the potential to illuminate the mechanisms through which experience becomes biology, and to challenge decontextualized and reductionistic approaches to human development, behavior, and health.