The Human Diversity Dilemma: 
Navigating the Intersection of Microbiomes, Ethics, and Society in Africa

Human microbiomes form important ecosystems that have been associated with various health and disease phenotypes, sparkling the interest in studying their diversity in relation to human diversity. Historically, human diversity has been conceptualized in terms of race, ethnicity or nation in disciplines like physical anthropology, genetics and epigenetics. In microbiome research besides these labels human categorization also includes lifestyles and subsistence strategies, as well as generalizations like Western or non-Western to refer to populations, diets and microbiomes. 

Besides categories of race and ethnicity, microbiome studies also consider populations as communities transitioning from non-Western, rural lifestyles (hunter-gatherer, agriculturalist, and non-industrial) to Western, urbanized, or industrialized lifestyles. This transition correlates with a shift in health: from communicable to non-communicable diseases influenced by the microbiome.

While categories are important to identify units of study and to generalize results, these also can bias knowledge. On the epistemic side, the use of these categories can lead to missing the real factors impacting populations (as those categories are often used as proxies for other factors) or the risk of misplacing individuals into categories that may not be relevant for treatment or risk-factor assessment. On the ethical side, these categories can, for example, lead to build stereotypes of primitivity about populations, racialization, and discrimination. 

 

Moreover, there are still important economic differences between countries in the Global North (and their historical colonial wealth) and those of the Global South (most of them ex-colonies) that translate into current scientific capabilities. These differences have a direct or indirect effect on the epistemic questions asked and the quality of the answers generated.

In this event, we aim to tackle these issues from an interdisciplinary approach.  We invite medical and ecological microbiologists, philosophers, historians and social scientists to discuss together from different disciplinary perspectives. For that purpose, this workshop has three aims: 

(1) to create fruitful ways of academic collaboration between different disciplines,
(2) to understand the reasons, epistemic or not, for using race, ethnicity, lifestyle, Western or other categories in microbiome research, as well as their potential epistemic and ethical (dis)advantages, and
(3) to communicate this debate to the public through a public talk on (neo)colonialism and race in science.

 

Organization
Abigail Nieves Delgado, Aline Potiron and Elian Schure

Utrecht University

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