Bennett McIntosh
I am a PhD candidate in History of Sci/Med/Tech and Science and Technology Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. I study scientific data sharing in 21st century: how and why it happens (or doesn’t happen), and how that shapes science. My dissertation, Genetic Associations: A Data-Centric History of the Social Genome, 1990–Present, describes the tight relationship between the data structures and social structures of social science genetics, which is a 21st-century research program that seeks to apply genetic tools and data to traditional social science questions about inter-individual variation.
In past lives I’ve been a wordsmith and an alchemist.
📣 I am currently interviewing researchers at the interface of genomics and the social sciences (incl. economics, psychology, social epidemiology...) about their experiences with data access, data sharing, and related matters. If you are interested in participating, you can email me or schedule a meeting here.
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Research
📣 May 2025: Read my preprint with Nicole Nelson and Kelsey Ichikawa on data sharing, environmental regulation, and scientific controvrsy: “Adversarial reanalysis and the challenge of open data in regulatory science”!
I work at the intersection of History and Science and Technology Studies (STS), examining how scientists, the questions they ask, the technology they use, and the world in which they live in all shape each other. I am interested in scientists’ data practices—how they make their data useable, portable, and intelligible—and what these practices mean about and for the context in which this science happens.
Stated more specifically, and with more STS shibboleths, I use historical and ethnographic methods to examine the infrastructure for circulation of scientific data. I am interested in especially in the implications of open data practices for managing controversies in interdisciplinary spaces.
My dissertation, Genetic Associations: A Data-Centric History of the Social Genome, 1990–Present, is an historical and ethnographic study of “social genomics,” an interdisciplinary research community that seeks to apply genomic and epigenomic data to the study of social outcomes and inequality. Where previous scholarship has approached social genomics by asking how social phenomena become subject to the authority of biogenetic discourse, my focus on the data practices of social genomics researchers—many of them trained in the statistical social sciences—foregrounds the role of tools and concerns endogenous to the social sciences, from the “replication crisis” in psychology to the “credibility revolution” in economics. The dissertation also explores data sharing as an arena for implicit and explicit contestation over the boundaries between science and pseudoscience.
I am also working on a project examining the relationship between open science, reproducibility, and environmental regulation with Nicole Nelson and Kelsey Ichikawa.
Teaching
As Principal Instructor
Bees, Trees, Germs, and Genes: A History of Biology (Hist Sci 132): Summer 2024
In this class we’ll meet unicorns and dragons, gods and magic rituals, and strange and disturbing theories about human difference. These may at first glance seem distant from the biology of today, but as we’ll see, the way scientists produced knowledge—even centuries before anyone called themselves a “biologist”—have consequences that are still with us. Though this course focuses on the past, you will develop the skills for thinking critically about the science of our own time: Why does biology work the way it does? Who benefits, and who is harmed? How can we understand biology as part of a long, ongoing project to understand ourselves and our place in the world? Download Syllabus (© 2024 Bennett McIntosh)
As Teaching Assistant
- Where Science Meets Society (STS 201): Spring 2025
- The Digital Age (Hist Sci 150): Fall 2024 & 2021
- Biology and Society (Hist Sci 133): Spring 2024
- The Making of Modern Science (Hist Sci 202): Spring 2022
Bees, Trees, Germs, and Genes: A History of Biology (Hist Sci 132): Summer 2024
In this class we’ll meet unicorns and dragons, gods and magic rituals, and strange and disturbing theories about human difference. These may at first glance seem distant from the biology of today, but as we’ll see, the way scientists produced knowledge—even centuries before anyone called themselves a “biologist”—have consequences that are still with us. Though this course focuses on the past, you will develop the skills for thinking critically about the science of our own time: Why does biology work the way it does? Who benefits, and who is harmed? How can we understand biology as part of a long, ongoing project to understand ourselves and our place in the world? Download Syllabus (© 2024 Bennett McIntosh)
Recent News
July 2025: Kathryne Metcalf and I had a great time running the panel “Rethinking ‘Population’: Histories of an Idea in Human Genetics” at ISHPSSB. Thanks to Carolina Mayes for joining us and Abigail Nieves Delgado for stepping in to chair on short notice!
June 2025: My review of Dalton Conley’s The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture is out now on H-Sci-Med-Tech
May 2025: 🚨 Preprint alert! 🚨 “Adversarial reanalysis and the challenge of open data in regulatory science” with Nicole Nelson and Kelsey Ichikawa , is out now on MetaArXiv
May 2025: I presented at both The Advances in Social Genomics Conference (TAGC) in Madison, WI, and the European Social Science Genomics Network (ESSGN) conference in Bristol, UK this month. Thanks to all the geneticists and social scientists at both conferences for their thoughtful engagement with my work.
Writing
I worked for several years as a full-time journalist and science writer, covering genetics, neuroscience, technology, and assorted other topics. Nowdays, most of my writing is academic, though I occasionally blog about what I'm reading, and still take the rare writing or editing gig.
Some of my favorites:
- “Red Wine, a Fraying Order, and the Science Journalism We Need” (for Science for the People)
- “Ghost Stories for the Apocalypse” (on Ken Liu’s The Hidden Girl and Other Stories for Harvard Magazine)
- “The Science of Sex” (profile of historian and philosopher of science Sarah Richardson for Harvard Magazine)
You can browse my work in Princeton Alumni Weekly, Harvard Magazine, NOVAnext, Science for the People, Oceanus, and Tenderly; or download my CV to view the full list.
For inquiries related to my writing and editing, please email bennettmcintosh аt duck dоt cоm. If you are pitching a metaverse product, please include "[spam]" in the subject line to ensure your pitch receives appropriate attention.
Miscellany
You should check out Marina Bolotnikova's journalism. In my (not entirely unbiased) opinion, it's some of the best, most important writing out there.
Games
Some of these are new ways of playing games that already exist—in-browser tools that help or encourage you to play with others, either over email or IRL (that’s both a manifesto of what the Internet should be for and an artifact of me being a noob at web stuff and not rolling my own infrastructure). Others are just things that I wanted to exist, so I made them, because that’s the joy of having your own website.
🌻 Play word games with Grandma without bloated adware apps...
...or this “strange game”/Cold War artifact developed by physicist George Gamow
Roll the dice for D&D or your favorite RPG...
...or for the manifold risks of modern living
Cats!
