ABSTRACT
This chapter takes a closer look at the 'production side' of scientific risk assessments and examine the relevant infrastructures to such knowledge generation in science and society. Building on these approaches, this chapter discusses some of the key categories such as individual and population, genes and environment which have structured much of contemporary epidemiology. The first part of this chapter describes the relationship of the 'individual' and the 'population' in an epidemiological study and develops how, from a large study collective, quantitative risk estimates are produced at the population level and translated to the individual level in preventive medicine. The second part describes how, with the new genetics, sequence data have entered risk factor epidemiology: data collected locally are enrolled into multinational genomics consortia and the matrix of disease causation is reorganized with the concept of 'genetic susceptibility'.
