In this introduction to the Handbook of DOHaD and Society, we provide an overview of the biosocial research field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). We first trace the evolution of this interdisciplinary field over the past two decades, charting the historical conditions that have brought DOHaD to a critical moment when the field is at a threshold of interdisciplinary innovation across both life and social sciences. We then discuss the biosocial perspective that DOHaD offers as its central premise and promise, allowing for questions of socio-environmental justice, discrimination, and equity to be centred in science and biomedicine. We explore the challenges that complicate this biosocial agenda in practice and attend to questions of research translation, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the socio-cultural dimensions of DOHaD-based health interventions. We end by highlighting the transformational potential of the DOHaD research paradigm and how this handbook offers a toolkit for robust interdisciplinary research in this field.

Despite the promise of a post-racial science, debates over the meaning and implications of race and population differences have persisted, albeit in transformed terms. Given that they eschew fixed genetic differences, ‘biosocial’ perspectives on race have brought with them a renewed focus on the social, historical, and political bases of contemporary health disparities. However, the move away from reference to fixed genes in describing how racial health disparities emerge or are maintained is not without problems. In this chapter, we first challenge the notion that the embrace of environmentally driven effects is inherently progressive, through an examination of the longue durée of pre-modern racial typologies. Second, we review recent research within DOHaD and environmental epigenetics that addresses racial health disparities. Our review reflects our concern that postgenomics has the potential to catalyse new forms of essentialism and typological thinking. Studies in our review hew closely to essentialist forms of racial thought, albeit now marked by methylation differences and adverse early life conditions. To avoid the return of racialised typological thinking, we suggest methodological interventions and various research orientations, such as interdisciplinarity, that can prevent a return to notions of fixed racial difference