Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47 (2014) 45e49
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Introduction
Human heredity after 1945: Moving populations centre stage Jenny Bangham a, Soraya de Chadarevian b a b
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany University of California Los Angeles, Department of History and Institute for Society and Genetics, 6265 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online 4 July 2014
The essays in this issue look at the contested history of human heredity after 1945 from a new analytical angle, that of populations and the ways in which they were constructed and studied. One consequence of this approach is that we do not limit our attention to the disciplinary study of genetics. After the Second World War, populations became a central topic for an array of fields, including demography, anthropology, epidemiology, and public health. Human heredity had a role in all of these: demographers carried out mental surveys in efforts to distinguish hereditary from environmental factors, doctors screened newborns and tested pregnant women for chromosome disorders; anthropologists collected blood from remote locations to gain insights into the evolutionary history of human populations; geneticists monitored people exposed to radiation. Through this work, populations were labelled as clinical, normal, primitive, pure, vulnerable or exotic. We ask: how were populations chosen, who qualified as members, and how was the study of human heredity shaped by technical, institutional and geopolitical conditions? By following the practical and conceptual work to define populations as objects of research, the essays trace the circulation of practices across different fields and contexts, bringing into view new actors, institutions, and geographies. By doing so the collection shows how human heredity research was linked to the broader politics of the postwar world, one profoundly conditioned by Cold War tensions, by nationalist concerns, by colonial and post-colonial struggles, by modernisation projects and by a new internationalism. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Human heredity Human populations Isolates Indigenous people Normal populations Blood samples
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
The essays collected in this issue take a fresh look at the contested history of human heredity after 1945. In spite of the field’s perceived association with racial policies and mass murder, the study of human heredity was invigorated in the postwar decade, marked, for example, by the First International Congress of Human Genetics, the founding and re-launch of several key journals, and the establishment of the first genetic counselling clinics. Existing accounts of human heredity research in this period tend to deal with the continued resonance of eugenic concerns or the promises of molecular approaches to the field (Comfort, 2012; Kevles, 1995; Mazumdar, 1992; Müller-Wille & Rheinberger, 2012; Paul, 1995; Paul, 1998). In this issue we propose to take the study of human populations as an analytical focus. By following the construction
E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Bangham). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.05.005 1369-8486/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
and study of populations, the essays show how human heredity research was linked to the broader politics of the postwar world, one profoundly conditioned by Cold War tensions, by nationalist concerns, by colonial and post-colonial struggles, by modernisation projects and by a new internationalism. One important virtue of directing attention to populations as a focal point for the study of human heredity is that we do not limit our perspective to disciplinary studies of genetics.1 Throughout the
1 Following Staffan Müller-Wille & Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2012) we take the term ‘heredity’ to encompass a broader range of questions and practices than those falling under ‘genetics’ in a more narrow disciplinary sense. For another recent collection that takes into account a wider range of disciplines with respect to human heredity, see: Gausemeier, Müller-Wille, & Ramsden (2013). Human populations are a major theme of a recent special issue of Current Anthropology that offers a comparative international perspective on the past, present and future of biological anthropology; see Lindee & Santos (2012).
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J. Bangham, S. de Chadarevian / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47 (2014) 45e49
twentieth century, populations were a central topic for a wide array of fields, including demography, anthropology, epidemiology, and public health. Human heredity had a role in all of these; physical anthropologists were fundamentally concerned with the study of heritable morphological traits, while eugenic thinking made heredity a central concern to practitioners engaged with epidemiology, public health and demography. These trends persisted in the postwar era, under changed technical and political constellations that the essays in this issue aim to address. Closely related, since the 1920s ‘population’ had been an area of significant political concern. The League of Nations made populations central to the geopolitical issues of migration, demography, land economies and colonial expansion, themes also addressed by, for example, the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems.2 After the destruction inflicted by the Second World War and with the Cold War, these geopolitical concerns were taken up by national governments, private foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, and new international institutions devoted to the monitoring and administration of public health, education, food production and science.3 The new United Nations (UN) and its allied agencies, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization, all worked to sustain populationrelated issues as central to the reshaping of international communities, the politics of decolonisation, and the negotiation of global public health standards. Over the next three decades, these organisations maintained a focus on populations as central to policies of development, migration, and reproduction, facilitating the circulation of technologies between contexts and disciplines.4 Meanwhile the embrace of nuclear energy for military and industrial purposes raised concerns over the hereditary and somatic effects of atomic radiation (Beatty, 1991; Creager, 2013; Lindee, 1994). This provided justification for placing special emphasis on epidemiological surveillance, a task supported by the WHO. UNESCO, too, with its mandate to foster peace through science, culture and education, initiated several projects that coalesced around the issue of population (Selcer, 2009). Directly relevant to some of the essays in this issue, UNESCO organised a campaign to educate the public about the scientific study of race, with a view to reducing racial prejudices.5 Several researchers successfully argued that genetics, based on the study of physiological and molecular markers, offered a way of turning the study of ‘race’ into the unprejudiced and objective study of populations.6 Many existing histories deal with the conceptual and rhetorical changes to race science during this period.7 The essays in this issue contribute to this literature by focussing on practices. They ask how populations were chosen, who qualified as members, and what technical, institutional and geopolitical conditions shaped the research. Taking population
2 There was general agreement within the League of Nations that ‘population densities and war were directly linked’ (Bashford, 2008). For a discussion of how ‘population’ was made into a boundary object between sociology, biology, anthropology, economics and psychology, see Ramsden (2002). 3 See Iriye (2002), Solomon, Murard, & Zylberman (2008). 4 One of the actors who contributed to this shift was evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, first president of UNESCO, who moved population planning to centre stage in his vision for “material and spiritual betterment”, see e.g. Connelly (2012), Bashford (2008), Huxley (1947, p. 12). 5 De Souza & Santos (in this issue). For the UNESCO statements and their commentary, see UNESCO (1952). 6 For a parallel discussion in the field of molecular evolution see Suárez-Díaz (2007). 7 See especially Reardon (2005), Lindee & Santos (2012), and other contributions in that special issue: ‘The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles and International Networks’.
studies as an analytic focus, the essays trace the circulation of practices across different fields and contexts, bringing into view new actors, institutions, geographies, and geopolitical contexts. 1. Unique and normal, pure and mixed populations Populations were not simply given. As Alexandra Widmer puts it in her contribution, much practical and conceptual work went into making populations into appropriate social and biological entities. How populations were defined and which were singled out for study depended both on the research questions asked and on the political status of those populations. Several fields and research programmes particularly valued the study of populations that were unusual, distinctive or remote. Many of these were already subjects of intense study in colonial, post-colonial or ‘enclave’ settings.8 Such populationsdas, for instance, the inhabitants of islands, or groups that were otherwise geographically, culturally and reproductively isolateddcould serve a range of different purposes. Some researchers believed that ‘parental’ or ancestrally ‘pure’ populationsdsuch as the Basques and Sami, which had supposedly remained unmixed for thousands of yearsdcould give access to the evolutionary and migrationary history of Homo sapiens; only once data on those populations were collected would researchers understand population structure sufficiently to probe more subtle questions. Joanna Radin has shown how Cold War anxieties about the future of human adaptability in a scenario of nuclear war, were used to justify the study of ‘primitives,’ characterised as unique portals to a pre-technological age (Radin, 2013). The study of populations ‘marked as vulnerable or closer to nature’ became vital ‘salvage’ work, relevant to reflections on the maintenance of the future health and adaptive potential of the species. Elsewhere, the study of indigenous populations became incorporated into modernisation programmes; Edna Suárez-Díaz in her contribution explores research done by population geneticists in the context of Mexico’s indigenista programmeda double-sided endeavour to bring health and education services to rural communities, while reinforcing the segregation of indigenous communities in their role as representatives of Mexico’s glorious past. Because of founder effects and inbreeding, these same groups were sometimes viewed as reservoirs for rare disease genes and as particularly well-suited for studying geneedisease associations and epidemiological correlations. A well-known example is that of the Amish people in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, whose genetic traits were studied in the 1960s by Victor McKusick, a pioneer of medical genetics (Lindee, 2005). Soraya de Chadarevian’s essay shows how clinical populations, such as the inmates of mental institutions, were recruited to perform similar functions. In an expanding postwar public health system that made space for new technological approaches, the clinic became a site for the construction of new kinds of populationsdsuch as pregnant women, foetuses, and patients with Down’s syndromedthat contributed to knowledge about heredity, disease and risk (Löwy, in this issue; Santesmases, in this issue). Common statistical approaches to population development and risk assessments linked these various studies. The construction of ‘normal’ populations and their relevant parameters was a more general issue that required extensive negotiation. Defining normal genetic variation achieved new valence in the Cold War period; specifically, the characterisation of elevated mutation rates from atomic exposure demanded a sense of the range of variation in unexposed or ‘control’ populations, against
8 For a longer history of the construction of a priori racial, national and geographical categories in human population genetics see Gannett & Griesemer (2004).
J. Bangham, S. de Chadarevian / Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47 (2014) 45e49
which other studies could be calibrated (Lindee, 1992). With such an aim in mind, researchers at Britain’s Medical Research Council Clinical Effects of Radiation Research Unit in Edinburgh, who were devoted to studying the effects of radiation on the human karyotype and the correlations between chromosomal abnormalities and disease, embarked on an extensive programme to screen all newborn babies in certain maternity wards (de Chadarevian, in this issue). Although the researchers were aware of the social bias in the data of hospital births, the newborns were made to represent the ‘general’ population. The range of observed variation surprised researchers, confounding ideas about what was ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. During the 1940s, researchers in Britain transformed the medical records of the ordinary population into a valuable source of genetic data. Arthur Mourant and his colleagues embarked on a project to map the genetic diversity across Britain, by co-opting donor records that were being amassed by the country’s National Blood Transfusion Services (Bangham, in this issue). Researchers insisted on only using records from those transfusion depots that had donor selection procedures that produced no bias with respect to blood type; only these were deemed appropriate for making credible population-genetic data. Such ‘unselected’ populations also had the potential to become crucial controls for association studies between blood groups and disease. At the time, some suggested that the availability of data on the unselected population was partly responsible for the eventual success of association studies in the 1950sdparticularly the positive correlations established between blood groups and certain cancers. In other contexts, researchers collected social, medical and biological data to be used in policy makingdwork considered useful both by those worried by inequalities in educational opportunity and those advocating hereditarian interpretations of difference. Edmund Ramsden (in this issue) shows how in the 1940s, Britain’s leading organisation for demography research, the Population Investigation Committee, was involved in several projects to assess contributions of environment and education on child development. Two largescale surveysdthe National Survey of Health and Development, and the Scottish Mental Health Surveydaspired to study ‘representative samples’ of the entire nation. Ramsden shows how researchers constructed samples of different kinds, depending on the objectives of the survey. For example a ‘Maternity Survey’ selected mothers across the country with confinements occurring in a particular week in March 1946; while the Scottish Mental Survey selected all 11-year old schoolchildren in Scotland on the first week of June in 1947dthe latter leading to the acquisition of data on 70,805 individuals. While ‘purity’ was seen as epistemologically valuable for projects that sought to establish the deep migrationary history of the world’s peoples, ‘mixture’ was often emphasised as crucial to the constitution of the general population. Purposely drawing a point of contrast with the emphasis on racial purity by certain strands of early-twentieth century anthropology, British geneticists and their compatriots often emphasised the ‘mixed’ quality of the country’s population. De Souza and Santos show how a long standing interest in ‘race mixing’, a constitutive narrative of the Brazilian nation, drove the establishment of human population genetics in that country. The Brazilian population in turn became a ‘living laboratory’ and model for studies of racial crossings and human diversity for local and international teams of researchers. In Mexico, too, geneticists and anthropologists helped construct the ‘Mestizo’da mixture of indigenous and European ancestrydas embodying the ideal of the Mexican nation.9
9 De Souza & Santos (in this issue), Suárez-Díaz (in this issue). For more recent developments see Schwartz-Marín & Silva-Zolezzi (2010), López Beltrán (2011), Lipphardt (2012).
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The practices of deciding who belonged to a population were fraught scientifically and politically. Several essays draw attention to multiple approaches used to establish such categories and make populations into relevant objects of study. Veronika Lipphardt’s essay pays special attention to the ways that researchers constructed and maintained ‘isolated’ populations through ‘biohistorical’ narratives: discourses of belonging, displacement, settlement, and family, that were used to define a set of individuals as a population. In some instances scientists drew on local or ‘received’ narratives about such populations; in others the stories provided by scientists clashed with local narratives of origins and belonging, as shown by Widmer in the case of Carleton Gajdusek’s studies of indigenous people in the New Hebrides. Other essays, for example those by Susanne Bauer and Lisa Gannett, describe how decisions about which populations were appropriate or interesting for study were shaped by the structures and practices of public health institutions (both national and international), global infrastructures of commerce, and colonial administrative networks, all of which helped to make certain populations particularly accessible, tractable or controllable. Meanwhile in the clinical research laboratory, populations were marked through disease and mental condition, and by their institutional settings such as schools, mental institutions and prisons. In other casesdfor example in studies of isolated or remote peopleddecisions about who qualified to be included in a collection of data required selective judgement: sometimes acknowledged, sometimes tacit. Standards for sampling seem to have undergone a shift between the early 1950s and the 1970s. During the early postwar years, papers describing blood collection barely mentioned sampling methods; where they did, decisions about who to test were often in the hands of ‘local assistants’ (Bangham, in this issue). But by the late 1950s, social anthropologists and linguists were claiming expertise about sampling and the construction of genetic ‘breeding’ or ‘natural’ populations.10 For instance, in the early 1960s, Gadjusek recruited social anthropologists to participate in his expeditions to collect biological samples from the people of Papua New Guinea, for his work on abnormal haemoglobins and malaria (Widmer, in this issue). Suárez-Díaz shows that medical geneticist Ruben Lisker, in his studies of the Mexican indigenous populations, followed the example of Franz Boas and adopted linguistic criteria to define and distinguish major groups among the indigenous people in Mexico. Lipphardt describes how Belgian physical anthropologist Jean Hiernaux also relied on the help of linguists and ethnographers in his sampling expeditions in Belgian African colonies.
2. Collecting data, making populations Having selected populations, what was collected, what was made visible, and for what purposes? Blood is a conspicuous theme in many of the essays in this issue. It was a multipurpose substance, made mobile by innovations in storage techniques developed during World War Two and capable of yielding to a range of technologies for making new things visible. Arrays of antiserum reactions were made to produce blood groups; electrophoretic gels were used to separate serum proteins and enzymes that served as genetic markers; blood cultures, complex preparation techniques and microscopes were deployed to reveal human karyotypes. Blood groups, protein variants, and chromosome pictures were assembled using these practices to address questions of evolution and population structure, disease mapping, epidemiological
10
Suárez-Díaz, in this issue. See also Lipphardt (2010).
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surveillance, public health interventions, the identification of clinically relevant cases, and the assessment of radiation or other environmental damagedincluding the effect of space travel on astronauts. The complexities of the procedures and apparatus used to collect, annotate, preserve, store and circulate blood samples can hardly be overestimated. Radin (in this issue) describes how the technologies for freezing blood, perfected in the postwar era, made it possible not only to transport blood over long distancesdwhich was essential for sampling expeditions far removed from the sites of analysesdbut to turn that blood into a ‘resource for the future’. Serum banksdrepositories for standardised but variable blood specimensdwere designed to be used by human population geneticists, physical anthropologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, and any future discipline for current or as yet unknown purposes. Some of the samples collected in the expeditions of the 1950s and 1960s remain scientifically interesting in the genomic era, though as Radin suggests, their uses today raise novel scientific and ethical problems. Contemporary genomic researchers have meanwhile created massive new repositories of blood and cheek swabs, often with commercial or forensic purposes (Gannett, in this issue). Blood samples were often collected and analysed in conjunction with other kinds of population data. A single population survey might deploy approaches ranging from anthropological, genealogical and demographic tools, to morphological and physiological measurements, to information about pedigrees and consanguinity. Particularly by the 1960s, data were collected by interdisciplinary teams composed, among others, of social and physical anthropologists, population and human geneticists, physicians and demographers. Molecular approaches did not displace older kinds of data; although blood groups, and later protein markers, were advocated by many as new and improved tools for studying human diversity, anthropometric datadincluding palm prints, and colour vision testsdcontinued to be collected in large numbers (Lipphardt, in this issue). Moreover, for the new category of ‘medical anthropologists’, it was important to collect data on disease incidence alongside other characteristics (Suárez-Díaz, in this issue). Instrumental to the making of population data were methods for managing and aligning observations. Blood groups, for example, were not studied as single objects, but were collated and given identities in aggregate. Lists of test results were arranged in boxes or copied onto index cards and ordered according to categories. They were reconstituted as population data in tables; made, through mathematical transformations, to yield gene frequencies; then redeployed in tables, graphs and maps (Bangham, in this issue).11 The way that samples, observations and test results were organised profoundly influenced the kind of information they yielded. This is particularly true for specimens collected in the clinic. For example, chromosome tests performed on single patients for diagnostic purposes were pooled in registries and used to make statistical inferences about risk in certain population groups or for population-based epidemiological studies (Santesmases, in this issue; Löwy, in this issue; de Chadarevian, in this issue). Analogous collection and accumulation practices were deployed in demographic surveys. The measures of ‘intelligence’, ‘achievement’ and ‘ability’ introduced in large-scale British surveys were not always stable. Ramsden describes how the ‘verbal ability’ tested by researchers on the Scottish Mental Survey was argued by some to be an inadequate proxy for ‘intelligence’ because it was
11 The management of paper records is a rich new theme in several histories of science; e.g. see Delbourgo & Müller-Wille (2012), and other articles in that special issue.
particularly amenable to environmental factors. Others questioned the techniques used for analysing test results, for example the practice of combining tests of ‘ability’ with those of ‘achievement’ when these could be seen as quite different things. Just as we claim for the blood group, karyotype or disease data collected in other settings, researchers recognised that the knowledge produced by such surveys was profoundly shaped by the techniques used to make visible their objectives of analysis, as well as the administration, statistical analysis and representation of the data. The standardisation of tools, samples and protocols was essential for comparing results across large multi-sited studies, and to make samples and data serve different interests. As several essays stress, the WHO played a key role in this context by appointing expert committees, publishing a series of technical reports, and establishing reference laboratories for sera, blood groups, haemoglobins and chromosomes, among others. Through its large network of research sites, the WHO disseminated these standards for collection, transport and preservation of samples. The vital role of standardisation for making credible comparisons is visible in the creation of serum banks, created to preserve, rather than to obliterate, the local variability of populations (Radin, in this issue). In summary, the essays in this issue show that between 1945 and 1970, ‘population’ emerged as a loose concept that nonetheless tied heredity to interests and concerns about progress and development, radiation, public health, East-West and post-colonial tensions. The essays also serve to show that the contexts within which populations were defined and studied were, in different respects, local; and that in important ways these localities shaped the knowledge produced. Two essays, both of which take us beyond the 1960s, offer particularly striking examples. Bauer moves the story into to the 1970s and 1980s, and to the Eastern side of the iron curtain, where the waning influence of Trofim Lysenko led to the re-emergence of genetics in cytogenetics, anthropology, radioimmunology and public health. These Soviet efforts filled in what had appeared as white spaces in earlier world distribution maps of genetic markers. Lisa Gannett brings the story into the twenty-first century, where the commercial realm is now significant for the study of population variation. Biogeographical ancestry (BGA) is a set of criteria for categorising human populations that (once more) is claimed to be ‘natural’, ‘objective’ and ‘genetic’, and purports to avoid racial categorisations. Gannett dissects the construction of BGA within the specific context of US forensic science, and questions the meaning and validity of its deployment in anthropological, genetic and commercial settings. The point of Gannett’s analysis, as that of other essays in the collection, is not to determine which approaches were right or wrong, but to bring into view the historical contingencies of the approaches to population and their broader meanings. In this sense, as Susan Lindee remarks in her final commentary, historians join mid-century geneticists, anthropologists, demographers and medical researchers in the quest to untangle the complex links that bind human heredity to history. Acknowledgements We thank Jean Gayon from the Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques, Claudine Cohen from the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and Jean-Paul Gaudillière from Cermes 3 for generously supporting the workshop on ‘Human Heredity: biology, anthropology and public health’, held at the Maison Suger in Paris in June 2011, where several contributors to this issue met and that served as a springboard for the plan of this issue. We also gratefully acknowledge support from the Wellcome Trust, the Genetics Society in Britain and the Wellcome Trust Strategic Award on Generation to Reproduction at the University of
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Cambridge for support to hold the second workshop in Cambridge in June 2012. We thank Veronika Lipphardt at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin for support on many levels and for providing an optimal environment for the final work on the issue. We are grateful to Edna Suárez-Díaz, Susan Lindee, Joanna Radin, Joao Rangel de Almeida, and Veronika Lipphardt for their comments on this introduction; to Sophia Davis, Caitlin Doherty and Lyndsey Cockwell for their careful copyediting of the essays in the issue; and to Greg Radick for his congenial editorship. References Bashford, A. (2008). Population, geopolitics, and international organizations in the mid twentieth century. Journal of World History, 19, 327e347. Beatty, J. (1991). Genetics in the atomic age: The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, 1947e57. In K. R. Benson, J. Maienschein, & R. Rainger (Eds.), The American expansion of biology (pp. 284e324). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Comfort, N. (2012). The science of human perfection: How genes became the heart of American medicine. Yale University Press. Connelly, M. (2012). Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Creager, A. N. H. (2013). Life atomic: A history of radioisotopes in science and medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Delbourgo, J., & Müller-Wille, S. (2012). Listmania: How lists can open up fresh possibilities for research in the history of science. Isis, 103, 710e715. Gannett, L., & Griesemer, J. R. (2004). The ABO blood groups: Mapping the history and geography of genes in Homo sapiens. In Classical genetic research and its legacy. London and New York: Routledge. Gausemeier, B., Müller-Wille, S., & Ramsden, E. (Eds.). (2013). Human heredity in the twentieth century. London: Pickering and Chatto. Huxley, J. S. (1947). UNESCO: Its purpose and its philosophy. Washington: Public Affairs Press. Iriye, A. (2002). Global community: The role of international organizations in the making of the contemporary world. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kevles, D. (1995). In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity. Harvard University Press. Lindee, M. S. (1992). What is a mutation? Identifying heritable change in the offspring of survivors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Journal of the History of Biology, 25, 231e255.
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Lindee, M. S. (1994). Suffering made real: American science and the survivors at Hiroshima. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lindee, M. S. (2005). Moments of truth in genetic medicine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lindee, M. S., & Santos, R. V. (2012). The biological anthropology of living human populations: World histories, national styles, and international networks: An introduction to supplement 5. Current Anthropology, 53(S5), S3eS16. Lipphardt, V. (2010). The Jewish community of Romedan isolated population? Sampling procedures and biohistorical narratives in genetic analysis in the 1950s. BioSocieties, 5, 306e329. Lipphardt, V. (2012). Isolates and crosses in human population genetics; or, a contextualization of German race science. Current Anthropology, 53(S5), S69e S82. López Beltrán, C. (Ed.). (2011). Genes (&) mestizos: Genómica y raza en la biomedicine Mexicana. Mexico: UNAM/Ficiticia. Mazumdar, P. (1992). Eugenics, human genetics and human failings: The Eugenics Society, its sources and its critics in Britain. London: Routledge. Müller-Wille, S., & Rheinberger, H.-J. (2012). A cultural history of heredity. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Paul, D. B. (1995). Controlling human heredity, 1865 to the present. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Paul, D. B. (1998). The politics of heredity: Essays on eugenics, biomedicine, and the nature-nurture debate. New York: State University of New York Press. Radin, J. (2013). Latent life: Concepts and practices of human tissue preservation in the International Biological Program. Social Studies of Science, 43, 484e508. Ramsden, E. (2002). Carving up population science: Eugenics, demography and the controversy over the ‘biological law’ of population growth. Social Studies of Science, 32, 857e899. Reardon, J. (2005). Race to the finish: Identity and governance in an age of genomics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Schwartz-Marín, E., & Silva-Zolezzi, I. (2010). ‘The map of the Mexican’s genome’: Overlapping national identity, and population genomics. Identity in the Information Society, 3, 489e514. Selcer, P. (2009). The view from everywhere: Disciplining diversity in post-World War II international social science. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 45, 309e329. Solomon, S. G., Murard, L., & Zylberman, P. (Eds.). (2008). Shifting boundaries of public health: Europe in the twentieth century. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Suárez-Díaz, E. (2007). The rhetoric of informational molecules: Authority and promises in the early study of molecular evolution. Science in Context, 20, 649e 677. UNESCO. (1952). The race concept: Results of an inquiry. Paris, France: UNESCO.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsc
Introduction
Human heredity after 1945: Moving populations centre stage Jenny Bangham a, Soraya de Chadarevian b a b
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195 Berlin, Germany University of California Los Angeles, Department of History and Institute for Society and Genetics, 6265 Bunche Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473, USA
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online 4 July 2014
The essays in this issue look at the contested history of human heredity after 1945 from a new analytical angle, that of populations and the ways in which they were constructed and studied. One consequence of this approach is that we do not limit our attention to the disciplinary study of genetics. After the Second World War, populations became a central topic for an array of fields, including demography, anthropology, epidemiology, and public health. Human heredity had a role in all of these: demographers carried out mental surveys in efforts to distinguish hereditary from environmental factors, doctors screened newborns and tested pregnant women for chromosome disorders; anthropologists collected blood from remote locations to gain insights into the evolutionary history of human populations; geneticists monitored people exposed to radiation. Through this work, populations were labelled as clinical, normal, primitive, pure, vulnerable or exotic. We ask: how were populations chosen, who qualified as members, and how was the study of human heredity shaped by technical, institutional and geopolitical conditions? By following the practical and conceptual work to define populations as objects of research, the essays trace the circulation of practices across different fields and contexts, bringing into view new actors, institutions, and geographies. By doing so the collection shows how human heredity research was linked to the broader politics of the postwar world, one profoundly conditioned by Cold War tensions, by nationalist concerns, by colonial and post-colonial struggles, by modernisation projects and by a new internationalism. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Human heredity Human populations Isolates Indigenous people Normal populations Blood samples
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
The essays collected in this issue take a fresh look at the contested history of human heredity after 1945. In spite of the field’s perceived association with racial policies and mass murder, the study of human heredity was invigorated in the postwar decade, marked, for example, by the First International Congress of Human Genetics, the founding and re-launch of several key journals, and the establishment of the first genetic counselling clinics. Existing accounts of human heredity research in this period tend to deal with the continued resonance of eugenic concerns or the promises of molecular approaches to the field (Comfort, 2012; Kevles, 1995; Mazumdar, 1992; Müller-Wille & Rheinberger, 2012; Paul, 1995; Paul, 1998). In this issue we propose to take the study of human populations as an analytical focus. By following the construction
E-mail address: [email protected] (J. Bangham). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.05.005 1369-8486/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
and study of populations, the essays show how human heredity research was linked to the broader politics of the postwar world, one profoundly conditioned by Cold War tensions, by nationalist concerns, by colonial and post-colonial struggles, by modernisation projects and by a new internationalism. One important virtue of directing attention to populations as a focal point for the study of human heredity is that we do not limit our perspective to disciplinary studies of genetics.1 Throughout the
1 Following Staffan Müller-Wille & Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2012) we take the term ‘heredity’ to encompass a broader range of questions and practices than those falling under ‘genetics’ in a more narrow disciplinary sense. For another recent collection that takes into account a wider range of disciplines with respect to human heredity, see: Gausemeier, Müller-Wille, & Ramsden (2013). Human populations are a major theme of a recent special issue of Current Anthropology that offers a comparative international perspective on the past, present and future of biological anthropology; see Lindee & Santos (2012).
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twentieth century, populations were a central topic for a wide array of fields, including demography, anthropology, epidemiology, and public health. Human heredity had a role in all of these; physical anthropologists were fundamentally concerned with the study of heritable morphological traits, while eugenic thinking made heredity a central concern to practitioners engaged with epidemiology, public health and demography. These trends persisted in the postwar era, under changed technical and political constellations that the essays in this issue aim to address. Closely related, since the 1920s ‘population’ had been an area of significant political concern. The League of Nations made populations central to the geopolitical issues of migration, demography, land economies and colonial expansion, themes also addressed by, for example, the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems.2 After the destruction inflicted by the Second World War and with the Cold War, these geopolitical concerns were taken up by national governments, private foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, and new international institutions devoted to the monitoring and administration of public health, education, food production and science.3 The new United Nations (UN) and its allied agencies, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization, all worked to sustain populationrelated issues as central to the reshaping of international communities, the politics of decolonisation, and the negotiation of global public health standards. Over the next three decades, these organisations maintained a focus on populations as central to policies of development, migration, and reproduction, facilitating the circulation of technologies between contexts and disciplines.4 Meanwhile the embrace of nuclear energy for military and industrial purposes raised concerns over the hereditary and somatic effects of atomic radiation (Beatty, 1991; Creager, 2013; Lindee, 1994). This provided justification for placing special emphasis on epidemiological surveillance, a task supported by the WHO. UNESCO, too, with its mandate to foster peace through science, culture and education, initiated several projects that coalesced around the issue of population (Selcer, 2009). Directly relevant to some of the essays in this issue, UNESCO organised a campaign to educate the public about the scientific study of race, with a view to reducing racial prejudices.5 Several researchers successfully argued that genetics, based on the study of physiological and molecular markers, offered a way of turning the study of ‘race’ into the unprejudiced and objective study of populations.6 Many existing histories deal with the conceptual and rhetorical changes to race science during this period.7 The essays in this issue contribute to this literature by focussing on practices. They ask how populations were chosen, who qualified as members, and what technical, institutional and geopolitical conditions shaped the research. Taking population
2 There was general agreement within the League of Nations that ‘population densities and war were directly linked’ (Bashford, 2008). For a discussion of how ‘population’ was made into a boundary object between sociology, biology, anthropology, economics and psychology, see Ramsden (2002). 3 See Iriye (2002), Solomon, Murard, & Zylberman (2008). 4 One of the actors who contributed to this shift was evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, first president of UNESCO, who moved population planning to centre stage in his vision for “material and spiritual betterment”, see e.g. Connelly (2012), Bashford (2008), Huxley (1947, p. 12). 5 De Souza & Santos (in this issue). For the UNESCO statements and their commentary, see UNESCO (1952). 6 For a parallel discussion in the field of molecular evolution see Suárez-Díaz (2007). 7 See especially Reardon (2005), Lindee & Santos (2012), and other contributions in that special issue: ‘The Biological Anthropology of Living Human Populations: World Histories, National Styles and International Networks’.
studies as an analytic focus, the essays trace the circulation of practices across different fields and contexts, bringing into view new actors, institutions, geographies, and geopolitical contexts. 1. Unique and normal, pure and mixed populations Populations were not simply given. As Alexandra Widmer puts it in her contribution, much practical and conceptual work went into making populations into appropriate social and biological entities. How populations were defined and which were singled out for study depended both on the research questions asked and on the political status of those populations. Several fields and research programmes particularly valued the study of populations that were unusual, distinctive or remote. Many of these were already subjects of intense study in colonial, post-colonial or ‘enclave’ settings.8 Such populationsdas, for instance, the inhabitants of islands, or groups that were otherwise geographically, culturally and reproductively isolateddcould serve a range of different purposes. Some researchers believed that ‘parental’ or ancestrally ‘pure’ populationsdsuch as the Basques and Sami, which had supposedly remained unmixed for thousands of yearsdcould give access to the evolutionary and migrationary history of Homo sapiens; only once data on those populations were collected would researchers understand population structure sufficiently to probe more subtle questions. Joanna Radin has shown how Cold War anxieties about the future of human adaptability in a scenario of nuclear war, were used to justify the study of ‘primitives,’ characterised as unique portals to a pre-technological age (Radin, 2013). The study of populations ‘marked as vulnerable or closer to nature’ became vital ‘salvage’ work, relevant to reflections on the maintenance of the future health and adaptive potential of the species. Elsewhere, the study of indigenous populations became incorporated into modernisation programmes; Edna Suárez-Díaz in her contribution explores research done by population geneticists in the context of Mexico’s indigenista programmeda double-sided endeavour to bring health and education services to rural communities, while reinforcing the segregation of indigenous communities in their role as representatives of Mexico’s glorious past. Because of founder effects and inbreeding, these same groups were sometimes viewed as reservoirs for rare disease genes and as particularly well-suited for studying geneedisease associations and epidemiological correlations. A well-known example is that of the Amish people in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana, whose genetic traits were studied in the 1960s by Victor McKusick, a pioneer of medical genetics (Lindee, 2005). Soraya de Chadarevian’s essay shows how clinical populations, such as the inmates of mental institutions, were recruited to perform similar functions. In an expanding postwar public health system that made space for new technological approaches, the clinic became a site for the construction of new kinds of populationsdsuch as pregnant women, foetuses, and patients with Down’s syndromedthat contributed to knowledge about heredity, disease and risk (Löwy, in this issue; Santesmases, in this issue). Common statistical approaches to population development and risk assessments linked these various studies. The construction of ‘normal’ populations and their relevant parameters was a more general issue that required extensive negotiation. Defining normal genetic variation achieved new valence in the Cold War period; specifically, the characterisation of elevated mutation rates from atomic exposure demanded a sense of the range of variation in unexposed or ‘control’ populations, against
8 For a longer history of the construction of a priori racial, national and geographical categories in human population genetics see Gannett & Griesemer (2004).
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which other studies could be calibrated (Lindee, 1992). With such an aim in mind, researchers at Britain’s Medical Research Council Clinical Effects of Radiation Research Unit in Edinburgh, who were devoted to studying the effects of radiation on the human karyotype and the correlations between chromosomal abnormalities and disease, embarked on an extensive programme to screen all newborn babies in certain maternity wards (de Chadarevian, in this issue). Although the researchers were aware of the social bias in the data of hospital births, the newborns were made to represent the ‘general’ population. The range of observed variation surprised researchers, confounding ideas about what was ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’. During the 1940s, researchers in Britain transformed the medical records of the ordinary population into a valuable source of genetic data. Arthur Mourant and his colleagues embarked on a project to map the genetic diversity across Britain, by co-opting donor records that were being amassed by the country’s National Blood Transfusion Services (Bangham, in this issue). Researchers insisted on only using records from those transfusion depots that had donor selection procedures that produced no bias with respect to blood type; only these were deemed appropriate for making credible population-genetic data. Such ‘unselected’ populations also had the potential to become crucial controls for association studies between blood groups and disease. At the time, some suggested that the availability of data on the unselected population was partly responsible for the eventual success of association studies in the 1950sdparticularly the positive correlations established between blood groups and certain cancers. In other contexts, researchers collected social, medical and biological data to be used in policy makingdwork considered useful both by those worried by inequalities in educational opportunity and those advocating hereditarian interpretations of difference. Edmund Ramsden (in this issue) shows how in the 1940s, Britain’s leading organisation for demography research, the Population Investigation Committee, was involved in several projects to assess contributions of environment and education on child development. Two largescale surveysdthe National Survey of Health and Development, and the Scottish Mental Health Surveydaspired to study ‘representative samples’ of the entire nation. Ramsden shows how researchers constructed samples of different kinds, depending on the objectives of the survey. For example a ‘Maternity Survey’ selected mothers across the country with confinements occurring in a particular week in March 1946; while the Scottish Mental Survey selected all 11-year old schoolchildren in Scotland on the first week of June in 1947dthe latter leading to the acquisition of data on 70,805 individuals. While ‘purity’ was seen as epistemologically valuable for projects that sought to establish the deep migrationary history of the world’s peoples, ‘mixture’ was often emphasised as crucial to the constitution of the general population. Purposely drawing a point of contrast with the emphasis on racial purity by certain strands of early-twentieth century anthropology, British geneticists and their compatriots often emphasised the ‘mixed’ quality of the country’s population. De Souza and Santos show how a long standing interest in ‘race mixing’, a constitutive narrative of the Brazilian nation, drove the establishment of human population genetics in that country. The Brazilian population in turn became a ‘living laboratory’ and model for studies of racial crossings and human diversity for local and international teams of researchers. In Mexico, too, geneticists and anthropologists helped construct the ‘Mestizo’da mixture of indigenous and European ancestrydas embodying the ideal of the Mexican nation.9
9 De Souza & Santos (in this issue), Suárez-Díaz (in this issue). For more recent developments see Schwartz-Marín & Silva-Zolezzi (2010), López Beltrán (2011), Lipphardt (2012).
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The practices of deciding who belonged to a population were fraught scientifically and politically. Several essays draw attention to multiple approaches used to establish such categories and make populations into relevant objects of study. Veronika Lipphardt’s essay pays special attention to the ways that researchers constructed and maintained ‘isolated’ populations through ‘biohistorical’ narratives: discourses of belonging, displacement, settlement, and family, that were used to define a set of individuals as a population. In some instances scientists drew on local or ‘received’ narratives about such populations; in others the stories provided by scientists clashed with local narratives of origins and belonging, as shown by Widmer in the case of Carleton Gajdusek’s studies of indigenous people in the New Hebrides. Other essays, for example those by Susanne Bauer and Lisa Gannett, describe how decisions about which populations were appropriate or interesting for study were shaped by the structures and practices of public health institutions (both national and international), global infrastructures of commerce, and colonial administrative networks, all of which helped to make certain populations particularly accessible, tractable or controllable. Meanwhile in the clinical research laboratory, populations were marked through disease and mental condition, and by their institutional settings such as schools, mental institutions and prisons. In other casesdfor example in studies of isolated or remote peopleddecisions about who qualified to be included in a collection of data required selective judgement: sometimes acknowledged, sometimes tacit. Standards for sampling seem to have undergone a shift between the early 1950s and the 1970s. During the early postwar years, papers describing blood collection barely mentioned sampling methods; where they did, decisions about who to test were often in the hands of ‘local assistants’ (Bangham, in this issue). But by the late 1950s, social anthropologists and linguists were claiming expertise about sampling and the construction of genetic ‘breeding’ or ‘natural’ populations.10 For instance, in the early 1960s, Gadjusek recruited social anthropologists to participate in his expeditions to collect biological samples from the people of Papua New Guinea, for his work on abnormal haemoglobins and malaria (Widmer, in this issue). Suárez-Díaz shows that medical geneticist Ruben Lisker, in his studies of the Mexican indigenous populations, followed the example of Franz Boas and adopted linguistic criteria to define and distinguish major groups among the indigenous people in Mexico. Lipphardt describes how Belgian physical anthropologist Jean Hiernaux also relied on the help of linguists and ethnographers in his sampling expeditions in Belgian African colonies.
2. Collecting data, making populations Having selected populations, what was collected, what was made visible, and for what purposes? Blood is a conspicuous theme in many of the essays in this issue. It was a multipurpose substance, made mobile by innovations in storage techniques developed during World War Two and capable of yielding to a range of technologies for making new things visible. Arrays of antiserum reactions were made to produce blood groups; electrophoretic gels were used to separate serum proteins and enzymes that served as genetic markers; blood cultures, complex preparation techniques and microscopes were deployed to reveal human karyotypes. Blood groups, protein variants, and chromosome pictures were assembled using these practices to address questions of evolution and population structure, disease mapping, epidemiological
10
Suárez-Díaz, in this issue. See also Lipphardt (2010).
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surveillance, public health interventions, the identification of clinically relevant cases, and the assessment of radiation or other environmental damagedincluding the effect of space travel on astronauts. The complexities of the procedures and apparatus used to collect, annotate, preserve, store and circulate blood samples can hardly be overestimated. Radin (in this issue) describes how the technologies for freezing blood, perfected in the postwar era, made it possible not only to transport blood over long distancesdwhich was essential for sampling expeditions far removed from the sites of analysesdbut to turn that blood into a ‘resource for the future’. Serum banksdrepositories for standardised but variable blood specimensdwere designed to be used by human population geneticists, physical anthropologists, immunologists, epidemiologists, and any future discipline for current or as yet unknown purposes. Some of the samples collected in the expeditions of the 1950s and 1960s remain scientifically interesting in the genomic era, though as Radin suggests, their uses today raise novel scientific and ethical problems. Contemporary genomic researchers have meanwhile created massive new repositories of blood and cheek swabs, often with commercial or forensic purposes (Gannett, in this issue). Blood samples were often collected and analysed in conjunction with other kinds of population data. A single population survey might deploy approaches ranging from anthropological, genealogical and demographic tools, to morphological and physiological measurements, to information about pedigrees and consanguinity. Particularly by the 1960s, data were collected by interdisciplinary teams composed, among others, of social and physical anthropologists, population and human geneticists, physicians and demographers. Molecular approaches did not displace older kinds of data; although blood groups, and later protein markers, were advocated by many as new and improved tools for studying human diversity, anthropometric datadincluding palm prints, and colour vision testsdcontinued to be collected in large numbers (Lipphardt, in this issue). Moreover, for the new category of ‘medical anthropologists’, it was important to collect data on disease incidence alongside other characteristics (Suárez-Díaz, in this issue). Instrumental to the making of population data were methods for managing and aligning observations. Blood groups, for example, were not studied as single objects, but were collated and given identities in aggregate. Lists of test results were arranged in boxes or copied onto index cards and ordered according to categories. They were reconstituted as population data in tables; made, through mathematical transformations, to yield gene frequencies; then redeployed in tables, graphs and maps (Bangham, in this issue).11 The way that samples, observations and test results were organised profoundly influenced the kind of information they yielded. This is particularly true for specimens collected in the clinic. For example, chromosome tests performed on single patients for diagnostic purposes were pooled in registries and used to make statistical inferences about risk in certain population groups or for population-based epidemiological studies (Santesmases, in this issue; Löwy, in this issue; de Chadarevian, in this issue). Analogous collection and accumulation practices were deployed in demographic surveys. The measures of ‘intelligence’, ‘achievement’ and ‘ability’ introduced in large-scale British surveys were not always stable. Ramsden describes how the ‘verbal ability’ tested by researchers on the Scottish Mental Survey was argued by some to be an inadequate proxy for ‘intelligence’ because it was
11 The management of paper records is a rich new theme in several histories of science; e.g. see Delbourgo & Müller-Wille (2012), and other articles in that special issue.
particularly amenable to environmental factors. Others questioned the techniques used for analysing test results, for example the practice of combining tests of ‘ability’ with those of ‘achievement’ when these could be seen as quite different things. Just as we claim for the blood group, karyotype or disease data collected in other settings, researchers recognised that the knowledge produced by such surveys was profoundly shaped by the techniques used to make visible their objectives of analysis, as well as the administration, statistical analysis and representation of the data. The standardisation of tools, samples and protocols was essential for comparing results across large multi-sited studies, and to make samples and data serve different interests. As several essays stress, the WHO played a key role in this context by appointing expert committees, publishing a series of technical reports, and establishing reference laboratories for sera, blood groups, haemoglobins and chromosomes, among others. Through its large network of research sites, the WHO disseminated these standards for collection, transport and preservation of samples. The vital role of standardisation for making credible comparisons is visible in the creation of serum banks, created to preserve, rather than to obliterate, the local variability of populations (Radin, in this issue). In summary, the essays in this issue show that between 1945 and 1970, ‘population’ emerged as a loose concept that nonetheless tied heredity to interests and concerns about progress and development, radiation, public health, East-West and post-colonial tensions. The essays also serve to show that the contexts within which populations were defined and studied were, in different respects, local; and that in important ways these localities shaped the knowledge produced. Two essays, both of which take us beyond the 1960s, offer particularly striking examples. Bauer moves the story into to the 1970s and 1980s, and to the Eastern side of the iron curtain, where the waning influence of Trofim Lysenko led to the re-emergence of genetics in cytogenetics, anthropology, radioimmunology and public health. These Soviet efforts filled in what had appeared as white spaces in earlier world distribution maps of genetic markers. Lisa Gannett brings the story into the twenty-first century, where the commercial realm is now significant for the study of population variation. Biogeographical ancestry (BGA) is a set of criteria for categorising human populations that (once more) is claimed to be ‘natural’, ‘objective’ and ‘genetic’, and purports to avoid racial categorisations. Gannett dissects the construction of BGA within the specific context of US forensic science, and questions the meaning and validity of its deployment in anthropological, genetic and commercial settings. The point of Gannett’s analysis, as that of other essays in the collection, is not to determine which approaches were right or wrong, but to bring into view the historical contingencies of the approaches to population and their broader meanings. In this sense, as Susan Lindee remarks in her final commentary, historians join mid-century geneticists, anthropologists, demographers and medical researchers in the quest to untangle the complex links that bind human heredity to history. Acknowledgements We thank Jean Gayon from the Institut d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences et des techniques, Claudine Cohen from the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales and Jean-Paul Gaudillière from Cermes 3 for generously supporting the workshop on ‘Human Heredity: biology, anthropology and public health’, held at the Maison Suger in Paris in June 2011, where several contributors to this issue met and that served as a springboard for the plan of this issue. We also gratefully acknowledge support from the Wellcome Trust, the Genetics Society in Britain and the Wellcome Trust Strategic Award on Generation to Reproduction at the University of
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Cambridge for support to hold the second workshop in Cambridge in June 2012. We thank Veronika Lipphardt at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin for support on many levels and for providing an optimal environment for the final work on the issue. We are grateful to Edna Suárez-Díaz, Susan Lindee, Joanna Radin, Joao Rangel de Almeida, and Veronika Lipphardt for their comments on this introduction; to Sophia Davis, Caitlin Doherty and Lyndsey Cockwell for their careful copyediting of the essays in the issue; and to Greg Radick for his congenial editorship. References Bashford, A. (2008). Population, geopolitics, and international organizations in the mid twentieth century. Journal of World History, 19, 327e347. Beatty, J. (1991). Genetics in the atomic age: The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, 1947e57. In K. R. Benson, J. Maienschein, & R. Rainger (Eds.), The American expansion of biology (pp. 284e324). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Comfort, N. (2012). The science of human perfection: How genes became the heart of American medicine. Yale University Press. Connelly, M. (2012). Fatal misconception: The struggle to control world population. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Creager, A. N. H. (2013). Life atomic: A history of radioisotopes in science and medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Delbourgo, J., & Müller-Wille, S. (2012). Listmania: How lists can open up fresh possibilities for research in the history of science. Isis, 103, 710e715. Gannett, L., & Griesemer, J. R. (2004). The ABO blood groups: Mapping the history and geography of genes in Homo sapiens. In Classical genetic research and its legacy. London and New York: Routledge. Gausemeier, B., Müller-Wille, S., & Ramsden, E. (Eds.). (2013). Human heredity in the twentieth century. London: Pickering and Chatto. Huxley, J. S. (1947). UNESCO: Its purpose and its philosophy. Washington: Public Affairs Press. Iriye, A. (2002). Global community: The role of international organizations in the making of the contemporary world. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kevles, D. (1995). In the name of eugenics: Genetics and the uses of human heredity. Harvard University Press. Lindee, M. S. (1992). What is a mutation? Identifying heritable change in the offspring of survivors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Journal of the History of Biology, 25, 231e255.
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Lindee, M. S. (1994). Suffering made real: American science and the survivors at Hiroshima. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lindee, M. S. (2005). Moments of truth in genetic medicine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lindee, M. S., & Santos, R. V. (2012). The biological anthropology of living human populations: World histories, national styles, and international networks: An introduction to supplement 5. Current Anthropology, 53(S5), S3eS16. Lipphardt, V. (2010). The Jewish community of Romedan isolated population? Sampling procedures and biohistorical narratives in genetic analysis in the 1950s. BioSocieties, 5, 306e329. Lipphardt, V. (2012). Isolates and crosses in human population genetics; or, a contextualization of German race science. Current Anthropology, 53(S5), S69e S82. López Beltrán, C. (Ed.). (2011). Genes (&) mestizos: Genómica y raza en la biomedicine Mexicana. Mexico: UNAM/Ficiticia. Mazumdar, P. (1992). Eugenics, human genetics and human failings: The Eugenics Society, its sources and its critics in Britain. London: Routledge. Müller-Wille, S., & Rheinberger, H.-J. (2012). A cultural history of heredity. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Paul, D. B. (1995). Controlling human heredity, 1865 to the present. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Paul, D. B. (1998). The politics of heredity: Essays on eugenics, biomedicine, and the nature-nurture debate. New York: State University of New York Press. Radin, J. (2013). Latent life: Concepts and practices of human tissue preservation in the International Biological Program. Social Studies of Science, 43, 484e508. Ramsden, E. (2002). Carving up population science: Eugenics, demography and the controversy over the ‘biological law’ of population growth. Social Studies of Science, 32, 857e899. Reardon, J. (2005). Race to the finish: Identity and governance in an age of genomics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Schwartz-Marín, E., & Silva-Zolezzi, I. (2010). ‘The map of the Mexican’s genome’: Overlapping national identity, and population genomics. Identity in the Information Society, 3, 489e514. Selcer, P. (2009). The view from everywhere: Disciplining diversity in post-World War II international social science. Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 45, 309e329. Solomon, S. G., Murard, L., & Zylberman, P. (Eds.). (2008). Shifting boundaries of public health: Europe in the twentieth century. Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Suárez-Díaz, E. (2007). The rhetoric of informational molecules: Authority and promises in the early study of molecular evolution. Science in Context, 20, 649e 677. UNESCO. (1952). The race concept: Results of an inquiry. Paris, France: UNESCO.
