Reflective and Strategic Category Work in Microbiome Science ' ' What is the FDA Going to Think ? ' ' : Negotiating Values through

The US National Institute of Health’s Human Microbiome Project aims to use genomic techniques to understand the microbial communities that live on the human body. The emergent field of microbiome science brought together diverse disciplinary perspectives and technologies, thus facilitating the negotiation of differing values. Here, we describe how values are Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), San Francisco, CA, USA Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford, CA, USA Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA Corresponding Author: Katherine Weatherford Darling, Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), San Francisco, CA, USA. Email: [email protected] Science, Technology, & Human Values 1-25 a The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permission: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0162243914545405 sthv.sagepub.com at UCSF LIBRARY & CKM on August 4, 2014 sth.sagepub.com Downloaded from conceptualized and negotiated within microbiome research. Analyzing discussions from a series of interdisciplinary workshops conducted with microbiome researchers, we argue that negotiations of epistemic, social, and institutional values were inextricable from the reflective and strategic category work (i.e., the work of anticipating and strategizing around divergent sets of institutional categories) that defined and organized the microbiome as an object of study and a potential future site of biomedical intervention. Negotiating the divergence or tension between emerging scientific and regulatory classifications also activated ‘‘values levers’’ and opened up reflective discussions of how classifications embody values and how these values might differ across domains. These data suggest that scholars at the intersections of science and technology studies, ethics, and policy could leverage such openings to identify and intervene in the ways that ethical/regulatory and scientific/technical practices are coproduced within unfolding research.