The 2010 special issue of Journal of Health and Social Behavior, titled “Fifty Years of Medical Sociology,” defined the contours of the medical sociological perspective. We use this as a backdrop to outline and assess the continued integration of genetics into medical sociology research. We contend that the explosion of genetic and epigenetic data in population health data sources has made the medical sociological perspective increasingly relevant to researchers outside of sociology, including public health, epidemiology, and quantitative genetics. We describe vast, underappreciated, and mostly unsolved challenges that limit the scientifically appropriate interest in incorporating genetics into existing paradigms. It is our hope that medical sociologists continue this integration but redouble efforts to maintain the core insights in social science research, such as the importance of environmental and structural (i.e., nonbiological) factors in determining health processes and outcomes and the use of rich, integrated, and rigorous empirical analyses.

2010年健康与社会行为杂志特刊，标题为“医学社会学五十年”，定义了医学社会学观点的轮廓。我们以此为背景来概述和评估遗传学在医学社会学研究中的持续整合。我们认为，人口健康数据源中遗传和表观遗传数据的爆炸式增长使得医学社会学观点与社会学以外的研究人员越来越相关，包括公共卫生、流行病学和数量遗传学。我们描述了巨大的、被低估的和大部分未解决的挑战，这些挑战限制了将遗传学纳入现有范式的科学兴趣。我们希望医学社会学家继续这种整合，但加倍努力保持社会科学研究的核心见解，