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

博士生Alison Cool(纽约大学)将在Rayna Rapp博士的指导下，就如何在多学科科学研究环境中实现沟通和共识进行研究。她将把调查重点放在瑞典从事双胞胎研究的科学家身上。瑞典是世界上双胞胎科研登记最多的国家。虽然双胞胎研究是行为遗传学家使用的最古老的方法之一，但斯堪的纳维亚的研究人员现在正在将纵向双胞胎数据与分子生物学的最新发展结合起来，这将把以前可能没有联合企业的研究人员聚集在一起。研究人员将专注于来自三个学科的瑞典科学家：行为遗传学、心理学和经济学。她将使用档案和人种学研究方法，调查他们如何在研究的每个阶段利用基因和环境的概念，从初始假设、实验设计、结果分析，以及通过在学科期刊上发表文章与更广泛的科学受众进行交流。该项目的研究目标是：(1)跟踪跨学科边界翻译和交流各类基因和环境的分类工作；(2)了解建立多学科共识和产生人类社会和经济行为知识所必需的条件；以及(3)记录和描述科学研究超越其区域和国家起源的过程，这些数据基于瑞典人口，并由瑞典科学家调查，以成为关于人类普遍行为形式的知识。这项研究之所以重要，是因为它关注当代瑞典科学实践的特殊性，将扩展更广泛地对待西方科学创新的理论模型。这项研究将有助于理解行为遗传学的社会和政策含义。资助这项研究还支持社会科学家的教育。

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.