Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Translating Twins: Twin Research and Genetic Knowledge Production in the Swedish Welfare State

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Doctoral student Alison Cool (New York University), supervised by Dr. Rayna Rapp, will conduct research on how communication and consensus are achieved in multi-disciplinary scientific research settings. She will focus her investigation on scientists in Sweden who are engaged in research on twins. Sweden is home to the world's largest register of twins for scientific research. While twin studies are one of the oldest methodologies used by behavioral geneticists, researchers in Scandinavia are now combining longitudinal twin data with recent developments in molecular biology, which brings researchers together who may not have had joint enterprises previously.The researcher will focus on Swedish scientists from three disciplines: behavioral genetics, psychology, and economics. She will use archival and ethnographic research methods to investigate how they instrumentalize concepts of genes and environments at each stage of their research, from initial hypotheses, designs of experiments, analysis of results, and communication to wider scientific audiences through publication in disciplinary journals. Research goals of this project are: (1) to track the categorical work of translating and communicating categories of genes and environments across disciplinary boundaries; (2) to understand what conditions are necessary to establish multidisciplinary consensus and produce knowledge of human social and economic behaviors; and (3) to document and describe the processes by which scientific research comes to transcend its regional and national origins in data based on a Swedish population and investigated by Swedish scientists to become knowledge about universal forms of behavior in humans. The research is important because its focus on the specificity of contemporary Swedish scientific practices will expand theoretical models that treat innovation in Western science more generally. The research will contribute to understanding the social and policy implications of behavioral genetics. Funding this research also supports the education of a social scientist.