Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 47 (2014) 185e190
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Discussion
Scaling up: Human genetics as a Cold War network Susan Lindee University of Pennsylvania, Suite 303, Logan Hall, 249 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
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In this commentary I explore how the papers here illuminate the processes of collection that have been so central to the history of human genetics since 1945. The development of human population genetics in the Cold War period produced databases and biobanks that have endured into the present, and that continue to be used and debated. In the decades after the bomb, scientists collected and transferred human biological materials and information from populations of interest, and as they moved these biological resources or biosocial resources acquired new meanings and uses. The papers here collate these practices and map their desires and ironies. They explore how a large international network of geneticists, biological anthropologists, virologists and other physicians and scientists interacted with local informants, research subjects and public officials. They also track the networks and standards that mobilized the transfer of information, genealogies, tissue and blood samples. As Joanna Radin suggests here, the massive collections of human biological materials and data were often understood to be resources for an “as-yet-unknown” future. The stories told here contain elements of surveillance, extraction, salvage and eschatology. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Human population genetics Genetic disease Public health Radiation risk Race science
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
1. Introduction Over the last century scientists collected and transferred human biological materials of many kinds from one location on the globe to another: from isolated groups to urban laboratories, and from specialized clinics to biological banks. As they moved, these materials acquired new meanings and uses. The papers collected here collate these practices and map their desires and ironies. They explore how a large international network of geneticists, biological anthropologists, virologists and other physicians and scientists interacted with local informants, research subjects and public officials. They also track the networks and standards that mobilized the transfer of information, genealogies, tissue and blood samples around the world. By the 1980s, some biological materials brought into this system had become subject to contested claims of ownership, reflecting emerging ideas about First Nations, indigenous rights and ethical constraints on scientists. Others were seemingly innocent and ethics-free: for example new systems in the 1960s brought all E-mail address: [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.05.018 1369-8486/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
industrialized newborns immediately into increasingly linked biological networks of surveillance. There was in these cases often a reassuring consensus (still roughly intact) that collecting and moving human biological materials had a clear purpose, which was consistent with the highest scientific, medical and social goals. As Joanna Radin suggests in this issue, the massive collections of human biological materials and data were often understood to be resources for an “as-yet-unknown” future. There are elements in the stories told here of surveillance, extraction, salvage and eschatology. Making human heredity, the subject of this volume, therefore involved many kinds of labourdfield work, collection, standardization, distribution, and also, as Lisa Gannett suggests, marketing and commercial development. By any measure, the sciences focussing on human heredity expanded in scale during the second half of the twentieth century, hence my emphasis on ‘scaling up’. Earlier work in eugenics and medical genetics tended to focus on collecting pedigrees, understanding how specific diseases appeared in families, or and carrying out comparative studies of twins (work of great import to behavioural genetics). But increasingly, human geneticists adapted the practices and theories of population
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genetics, the quantitative analysis of gene frequencies in identified breeding populations (flies, mice) that were so productive in the evolutionary synthesis. The associated collecting and storage networks built around human population genetics have had enduring consequences, and our historical picture of post-war genetics is enriched by this volume’s intervention. Four overlapping themes run through these papers. First, experts trying to understand human genetics were often engaged in projects linked to race and national identity. The hereditary properties of populations often seemed relevant to the health of the nation, its history, and its future. Certain groups (the isolates within modern nation states) seemed to carry particular symbolic weightdthe Zapotecs who could be brought in to the Mexican public health system, or the Pamir who could, in theory, become modern Soviet citizens. Experts also routinely drew on notions of race and racial classification to explore national and cultural identity, as de Souza and Santos demonstrate for Brazil. Population geneticists made race a robust technical resource for nationalism even as the Unesco race statements, produced by geneticists in the 1950s and 1960s, called into question general assumptions about the validity of race as a biological quality. Second, in a context of post-1945 atmospheric weapons testing, questions of genetic risk appeared and reappeared, justifying national support and validating the medical and moral importance of the study of human heredity. Radiation risk animated many large-scale projects, and these projects in turn generated data that could fuel fears of radiation risk. Genetics was a Cold War science implicated in geopolitics. Third, in this period a standardized technological system with fuzzy and expanding boundaries came into being. Human chromosomes were named and numbered by consensus, with rules about how to squash them, photograph them, and see the differences between them. Systems of neo-natal testing, which depended on commercial technologies, were established in most industrialized nations. The genetic code was deciphered, new genetic markers identified on the human genome, and Victor McKusick began the hard work of cataloguing human genetic disease. One cannot locate the origins of this complex system in any individual institution, lab, national setting, or even disciplinary group. Rather, it was the result of a cumulative process of emerging consensus that reflected technological change, opportunistic field research, and unprecedented funding for genetics research. Cumulatively it was the result of significant and growing interest in the technical elucidation of human heredity. Finally, the sciences of human biology were scaled up in a breathtaking expansion of collection and surveillance after 1950. We have, I believe, not previously fully appreciated how quickly this occurred. By around 1970, millions of research subjects and patients had been enrolled in human population studies focused on heredity. The samples and stories and data taken from them were stored and preserved indefinitely, and indeed many are still stored somewhere, under some regime of standardization and access. The papers here document that this occurreddthey capture the phenomenondbut they do not entirely explain it. I want now to address each of these themesdof nationalism and race, risk and radiation, technological standardization, and scaling updto suggest where they lead us, and to ask what questions they raise for historians of the Cold War. 2. Race and national identity The idea of a nation bound together by biological propertiesda racial nationdhas played a role in human genetics research
agendas for a century. In national contexts with heterogeneous, mixed, and stratified populations, including Brazil, Mexico, or the Soviet Union, even Britain, genetics was conceived as a potential resource for the construction of national identity. The biologically ‘natural’ cluster of the nation was characterized by statistical blood-group variation, by special hybridization practices, or by the presence or absence of meaningful forms of genetic disease. Attention to nationalism and heredity raises several questions: How has heredity functioned both in science and in the broader political and social arena as a surrogate for national or regional identity? How have particular genetic diseases acquired cultural meaning as supra-biological indicators, as markers of history? And what can these stories help us understand about the vexed history of race and racial thinking after 1945? Susanne Bauer explores the striking case of post-1970 genetics in the Soviet Union, as Lysenkoism waned and new enthusiasms for human population genetics emerged. This new genetics had ties to public health but also to national identity, as Soviet scientists studied remote indigenous populations within the USSR. The colonial territories of the Russian Empire were filled with people whose languages, customs, and bodily experiences did not yet conform to Soviet identity. In the Soviet Union, as in other settings, the goals of studying remote or isolated groups included an expectation that scientific contact would overcome their isolation and modernize themdessentially, that it would make them Soviet. The practice of genetics as a part of a civilizing mission underscores the biological properties of nationalism. Soviet medical genetics, Bauer shows, linked the institutional management of genetic and environmental risks to technocratic modernity, in the name of the Soviet Union. In Britain too ideas about genetic heritage were able to mobilize political desires. Jenny Bangham notes that in 1948 geneticists John Fraser Roberts and Cyril Darlington promoted a survey of British bloods. In their appeal to the Nuffield Foundation they noted the rich wealth of potential data accumulating in transfusion centres in the form of donor cards, and worried that these records were threatened with destruction. Britain, they explained, was a particularly important country for the study of human genetic diversity, owing to its “long and stable history, well authenticated records, high racial diversity and recognised genetic gradients”. In the context of a changing empire, biology and blood were interpreted as possible resources for an understanding of British identity. Examining a different national context, Edna Suarez asks how ideas of Mexican nationalism shaped practices in human genetics. Leading Mexican geneticist Ruben Lisker was looking for modern DNA that could define the Mexican nation. He expected his work to bring Zapotec populations into the international world of public health, and by extension perhaps, into the mestizo world of Mexico City. As Suarez demonstrates, Lisker was a provocative culture broker, trained in both Mexico and the United States, whose commitments to medical anthropology and genetics included a dream of a modern and scientifically legible Mexico. The technical details he examined were explicitly historical: Did the presence of 6-PGD (6-phosphodehydrogenase) deficiency and abnormal hemoglobins index a Mexican history of malaria? Or was it a record of a history of hybridization and the slave trade? Like the chromosomes in Lisa Gannett’s accountdin which bits of identity and continental geography appeared to be strewn across the genomeddiseases or deficiencies hitchhiked across the oceans on slave ships, and came to Southern Mexico without a legitimate pedigree, that is to say, without an environmental justification such as malaria. They were outsiders, immigrants, within both the body and the nation. Lisker, therefore, appropriated new biomedical technologies and practices in the study of nationhood, and used diseases to elucidate ideas of Mexican history and identity.
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To see these technologies applied in Mexico is to recognize how much nationalism could matter to a blood sample. That is the image that Suarez’s paper conjures. The vials of indigenous blood and the people they came from both needed to be annexed into Mexican history. Anthropologist Adriana Petryna’s notion of biological citizenship is perhaps here turned upside down (Petryna, 2002) In Mexico, in this case, biology did not become a resource for indigenous groups seeking rights based on biology or biomedical experience. Rather, their blood and its biology enrolled them as citizens in a new vision of the modern state. In their exploration of genetics and race-crossing in Brazil, Souza and Santos suggest how panmixia and miscegenation can to be a part of the expression of Brazilian national identity. After 1950, a long-running narrative about the history of Brazil as a reproductive meeting place, a crossroads of Europe, Africa, and the New World, was scientifically validated in studies of human heredity, gene flows and racial mixture. With populations seen as both unusually mixed and unusually pure, both urban and isolated, Brazil was a “racial laboratory” (on this point, see also Santos, Lindee, & de Souza, in press). It was also a nation with a long history of wrestling with the “race question” in terms of human rights, indigenous land claims, and conflict between the modernizing coastal areas and the inaccessible interiors. Race was clearly a defining element in the historical development of the “melting pot” of modern Brazil. Over and over again, geneticists from Brazil proposed that Portuguese males were unusually “open” to miscegenationda term that in Brazil carries no negative connotations. The celebratory characterization of Portuguese male desire in Brazilian identity egregiously elides, of course, the perspectives, desires or expectations of the indigenous or African women with whom Portuguese men produced children, presumably sometimes through coercion and rape. But it played a role in an image of Brazil as a scientifically informative racial laboratory, like Hawaii, a nature experiment in race crossing. The scientific work on human populations, Souza and Santos show, then fed back into the work of Brazilian national identity. These situations, in the Soviet Union, Britain, Brazil and Mexico, illuminate one key argument in Veronika Lipphardt’s examination of the uses and meanings of variation, population and race. Lipphardt notes that race has generally been perceived to be geographically patterned, transmitted from generation to generation and not easily changed in an individual’s life timedit was the unchanging and underlying property of variation that was of central importance in genetic research. Drawing on Widmer’s notion of “watermarks” in post-war human genetics, Lipphardt tracks the signs of enduring historical concerns with race that have not shifted despite shifts in language. The old ways of talking about human variation were not abandoned after 1950, but transformed. Terms such as ‘gradient’ and ‘isolate’ came to function as ways of describing variation, and these terms could and did function as surrogates for racedparticularly, for example, in Belgian field research in colonial territories of Rwanda, Burundi and Congo during the 1950s. Physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn characterized races as large groups which differ in heredity (Washburn, 1951). Perhaps, but which are the differences that matter, particularly given the qualities of race as a proxy for geography and political power? Jenny Bangham’s attention to convenience sampling documents the ironies of the high-flown language about isolation, purity, and primitiveness that appears in scientific papers in the 1960s about these matters. The British geneticist Arthur Mourant did not mind if his pure and isolated Basques lived in poor neighbourhoods in London. The results of their blood tests could still appear on his maps in Basque territory, because geographical identities clung to
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them and were present in their blood. Mourant, Bangham notes, thought that blood groups “besides having many purely scientific advantages over most other bases of classification” had the merit of providing objective criteria far removed from the traditional marks of ‘race’. Blood groups, he proposed, were objective, pure, and authentic, not like the visual markers of skin or hair. Sandra Widmer, too, notes that populations do not exist unproblematically in nature. They come into existence, she says, as the result of a process of practical and conceptual labour. She focuses on work with groups in the New Hebrides of Melanesia, who in the 1960s were configured as legible social and biological entities suitable for scientific study. The physician and field researcher Carleton Gajdusek and his colleagues operationalized “isolate,” she suggests, both in the field and in their published papers, a process that Lipphardt also explores. “Isolates”, Widmer suggests, were isolated through particular views of culture, and the genetic diversity of isolated populations on islands was connected tightly to a geographic and biological category, called race, or later (as Lisa Gannett demonstrates) “Biogeographical ancestry.” Malaria, which Edna Suarez explores in terms of the history or migration in Mexico, appears here also as a marker of race and history. Gadjusek called for a holistic picture of a group of people but collected medical, cultural and social information in order to contextualize the biological. He imagined that lines of biological descent would coincide with the identity of the group, and that this socio-political group had existed over a long period of time. On the islands where he collected blood samples, he needed to collaborate with local informants to understand relationships within communities. (Bangham notes how often local, and largely invisible, informants decided from whom blood should be taken, as they knew who was “pure”.) But as Widmer suggests the indigenous knowledge was only important insofar as it would allow Gadjusek to further isolate the variations present in the genes. In Gannett’s work we see a cognate processdof continuity by reformulation. Biogeographical ancestry (often abbreviated to BGA) is part of the new world of biomarkets and in her exposition she tracks a practical, down to earth, real-world agenda in crime control, bounded by a “frequency differential (5) more than 50 percent” between “any two major geographically or ethnically defined populations.” Gannett says that BGA is “not a natural kind,” but something else entirely. It is a market share, a patent, and a financing strategy. It is not even a concept, she proposes. “To say that BGA was an invention is to emphasize not that it is an invented concept but that it is an invented technology for which a patent application is pending.” BGA’s inventors and merchandisers, she says, enact “race” as it has been traditionally conceived and constructed as a natural kinddthrough taxonomy, typology, essentialism, objectivity and naturalness. Her explication of a single patent applicationda novel and intriguing use of this resourcedmakes it clear that the category of BGA involves a taxonomy of mutually exclusive classes in which family groups are inside ethnic groups, and ethnic groups are inside continental groups. In consequence the individual genome has become raced in new ways. In this way of seeing things, race is a populational quality that is transcribed at the individual level and the individual genome has “population structure.” Bits of the chromosomes are classified as Indo-European, SubSaharan, Native American or East Asian. The proportions of each determine an individual’s BGAdi.e. the continents are conceptualized in terms of DNA. Her observation about the crime-fighting efficacy of such tests is compelling: the tests work in a circulating feedback loop, in which certain markers dictate social places linked to behavioural expectations. To say that BGA is a surrogate for race is not wholly accurate. Rather, BGA is race embraced and denied simultaneously.
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3. Risk, radiation and the Cold War It is important to recognize that the risks that operated in postwar human genetics included not only the risks posed by global radiation exposure, but also risks of historical change. Many of those rushing to study indigenous or isolated populations expected them to disappear soon and be swept away by the modern world. The loss of these special groups, and of their bloods, was commonly interpreted as a loss to science. Radiation risk joined the risks of modernity to enhance the medical and scientific value of those supposedly unmarked by either. Attending to the ways that experts thought about radiation risk and heredity illuminates several questions: how did the Cold War reconfigure human genetics? What exactly were the various stakes involved in routine genetic testing, particularly of newborns? How did ideas about the evolutionary future of humanitydideas linked to eugenics (although the word is too overcharged to bear the full weight of this discussion) intersect with fears of radiation? Certainly scientific work had the potential to hauntingly validate emerging fears. De Chadarevian’s account of the large-scale epidemiological studies of the Medical Research Council Clinical Effects of Radiation Research Unit at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, under the direction of the radiologist and medical researcher Michael Court-Brown, provides a rich portrait of the shifting values of chromosomes in the study of risk. Court-Brown was one of the first geneticists to embrace large-scale karyotyping, even before new techniques using peripheral blood were available, and his enthusiasm resulted in data collection that revealed relatively frequent (if opaque) abnormality in the human chromosome count. His group promoted projects with a wide reach, applying these new methods of analysis to special populations such as leukemia patients, nuclear workers, and people exposed to radiation at Windscaledthe site of a major nuclear accident in the UKdand to newborns, prisoners, and isolated groups. Damaged chromosomes, Court Brown found, were common in these groups. By tracking Court Brown’s investments in karyotyping, de Chadarevian links newborn screening programs to both disease risk and to the tensions around social class that appear in Ramsden’s account of the post-war IQ surveys in Britain. Newly decipherable chromosomal abnormalities mirrored the chaos and uncertainty of the post-1945 global orderdof nuclear risk, a burning Cold War, and social and economic disruption. The excitement of this early period of chromosomal research, as de Chadarevian reminds us, led to both epidemiological and anthropological studies that enrolled many populations. Ilana Löwy’s account of prenatal diagnosis also touches on questions of risk, radiation, and population health, and intersects with Bauer’s study showing how Soviet geneticists linked prenatal testing to environmental risk. Löwy asks us to consider how and why prenatal diagnosis became genetic diagnosis. How exactly did the complexity of the developing foetus become a genetic problem, when such a small percentage of malformation is genetic (perhaps only four to seven percent)? Löwy proposes that “the association of genetic counsellors with decisions about the continuation of pregnancy after a diagnosis of foetal malformation” contributed to the idea that prenatal diagnosis primarily involved heredity, particularly in the context of public awareness of radiation risk. More than fifty years after the first prenatal diagnoses, she notes, the main ‘cure’ for severe foetal malformation today is the same as the one proposed in 1960: the termination of pregnancy. The identification of prenatal diagnosis with genetics in the professional and lay discourse helps to mask this uncomfortable fact and to maintain a powerful regimen of hopedhope sustained in a context of fear and risk.
This context was also crucial to Soviet genetics. As Susanne Bauer notes, radiation biology became a hidden resource for genetics even in the Lysenko period. The importance of radiation risk justified the use of more mainstream theories of heredity and research in closed research institutes. Nuclear sciences in the Soviet Union included radiation biology, and geneticists working in this context were protected from the general attack on modern genetics. After Lysenko’s influence waned, Soviet genetics rapidly engaged with the broad global project of human population genetics and cytogenetic analysis. Understanding mutation loads and the mutational equilibrium in the population played a key role in field work with human populations, and, as in many other national contexts, geneticists planned comparative studies of chromosome aberrations “in healthy newborns, newborns with congenital malformations, stillbirth, embryos of medical and spontaneous abortions.” At a broader scale, Soviet researchers proposed to monitor mutations by means of examining spontaneous abortions for cytogenetic alterations (to track the same kinds of chromosomal damage that de Chadarevian shows Court-Brown documented) as well as to monitor somatic mutation through studies of peripheral blood in adults. Bauer notes that through these field studies, “parts of Central Asia [became] a techno-scientific backyard to the Cold War.” In this context of collection and storage, how was standardization important to the Cold War assessment of risk and radiation? 4. Standardization Another critical element in the stories told here involves the rise of standards for the management of human biological materials. New analytical techniques suggested a more objective frame for public health decisionsdone that was more logical and subject to greater control. At the same time, the blood sampling collections were the product of a technological system of manipulation of records, reagents, instructions, maps and graphs. The bloods came into being inside a sociotechnical system characterized by a deep consensus. Standardization shaped access, travel arrangements, administration, collection and storage, and procedures for use. Recognized medical phenomena, for example Rhesus blood-group incompatibility or Down Syndrome or Phenylketonuria, led to blood collection programs, which then created standardized databases that could be used in new ways. What does the post-war standardization of chromosomes, gene nomenclature, lab protocols for labelling and storage, and so on, help us recognize about biomedicine in the twentieth century generally? How did scientists navigate this rapidly changing terrain, in which the value of a sample could shift depending on technologies of storage and analysis? Did standardizing practices betray their origins in their structure? Did they reflect the social and political circumstances of their creation? When María Jesús Santesmases looks at the technology of karyotyping, and at the whole system of extracting blood from human bodies and making images as a diagnostic tool, she calls our attention to standardization as a process. The chromosomes she explores were medical chromosomesdextracted in the hospitaldand made available as a result of amniocentesis. The production of the karyotype made the foetus a patient, by making the potential medical state of the fetus visible. Santesmases suggests that karyotyping made cytology clinicaldhuman heredity was reconstructed for cliniciansdso the karyotype facilitated the reintroduction of heredity and genetics into the clinic. She tracks a key and fundamental shift. Originally amniocentesis and karyotyping focused on testing women at risk of giving birth to a child with a specific hereditary disease, because they already had
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an affected child. Gradually, however, the system expanded to test all women of ‘advanced maternal age.’ This transformed prenatal diagnosis, partly because risks in the two circumstances were so different. A disease known to be present in a family posted a 25e 50% risk of repetition, depending on the disease. But the risk for Down Syndrome in women of advanced maternal age was one to three percent. A standardized system, applied to all, reconfigured the nature of risk and the clinical assessment of how and when risk levels could justify dramatic interventions. Her perspectives resonate with Löwy’s proposal of a complex relationship between prenatal diagnosis and congenital malformation. In 1972 the World Health Organization started consultations on Congenital Malformation Reporting, and this played a role in standardizing and institutionalizing the tendency to describe birth defects as “genetic.” Löwy suggests that pediatricians and clinical geneticists were ‘lumpers’: they could have sub-divided abnormalities more sharply into defects arising in gametes, those developing in the embryo, and those which appear later in pregnancy as a result of development, exposure or the general environment. They elected a different path: the lumping together of hereditary and non-hereditary congenital malformation and the maintenance of a strong link between prenatal diagnosis and the polysemic term ‘genetics’. By the early 1970s medical geneticists and anthropologists also contributed to international programs set up by the UN during the Cold War. These projects were largely about ‘methods’, having as one key goal the standardization of procedures and thus long-term data comparability. Mourant, as Bangham points out, was in charge of the Blood Group Reference Laboratory (BGRL) at the Lister Institute in London, which was responsible for standardizing and distributing antisera to blood grouping laboratories, within and outside Britain. In 1950 his lab was officially sanctioned by the World Health Organization (WHO), putting Mourant at the centre of a large international correspondence network. Joanna Radin’s powerful exploration of the standardizing protocols of the multipurpose serum bank highlights the logic of epidemiological surveillance, and the imagined future value of serum banks. She notes that when Yale physician John Rodman Paul froze serum in his early study of antibody patterns in North Alaskan Eskimos, he had an explicit intention of reanalysis at a later date. Paul praised the “unfolding” epidemiological value of the sera, expressing a future-orientation that was central to the surveillance activities and practices she tracks. Radin shows that for the human population geneticists, physical anthropologists, immunologists, and epidemiologists she tracks, these materials had a future value that was unclear and enticing. They also helped to establish systems of epidemiological surveillance that would transcend national borders. Freezers were international spaces, and, again, just as geography clung to the Basques in London in Bangham’s story, and geography occupied bits of DNA in Gannett’s, geography was frozen with the samples, their origins outlined in provenance records and disease surveillance data and also historical relationships and kinships. Collectively the papers here give new meaning to the notion of mapping genes: hereditary material in post-war human genetics was deeply geographical even when it was on its own, isolated from the people to whom it belonged. Radin’s work also highlights the ironies of standardizing practices of collecting, annotating, and preserving samples of blood collected from highly variable human (and sometimes non-human) bodies around the globe. She calls our attention to the Cold War tensions that shaped scientific authority. Unstable governments of recently decolonized nations were presumed to be unable to provide accurate and consistent information about disease and epidemiology. Standardized collections of blood serum, Radin
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notes, could provide politically authoritative evidence for the distribution of infection and nature of heritable and acquired resistance. Radin proposes that in these systems of rationality and desire, WHO is “not merely a place in Geneva, but a distributed network of facilities and standards that has been brought into being through investments in administrative as well as tissue-based infrastructures.” The protocols she tracks had the paradoxical effect of stabilizing blood as a fundamentally unstable, protean, and unfolding resource. Löwy, Santesmases, Bangham and Radin raise fresh questions about the standardizing systems of post-war human genetics. Ideas about the risk of genetic disease facilitated population-based screening for Down syndrome and promised control of the next generation. They also facilitated a sanitized prescription of ‘genetic termination’. At the same time massive standardized serum banks were established at great effort to enable an unknown future to unfold. Bodies, genes, clinical interventions and field practices were brought into alignment in a network of geneticists and other experts who imagined the possibilities of deep control of human heredity. Did genetics function to erase other risks, ease clinical interactions, and diminish parental guilt? Is this a part of the postwar scaling up process? 5. Conclusions: scaling up By any metric, human genetics as a discipline and medical practice was scaled up after 1950. In technology, scaling up refers to the movement of a given method or machine out of a test laboratory, where it is proven to work on a small scale, into industrial production. Usually scaling up requires innovation, because what worked in a single small facility might not in mass production, and new problems of scale emerge as production escalates. We can think of human population genetics as scaling up, from a small boutique discipline in about 1950 (with an incorrect human chromosome number, a limited number of diagnostic insights and few effective clinical interventions or biological tests) to a sophisticated system of collection, storage, surveillance and analysis by about 1980. What innovations did this scaling up require? What complexities did it reveal or create? And how and why did some expectations and assumptions about human heredity and human populationsdincluding powerful notions of race and racial differencedpersist almost immune to the deep and fundamental changes of the post-war period? As many of these accounts make clear, geneticists and their allies undertook extremely large-scale surveys and population studies after 1945. Bangham shows that Mourant’s book was the largest compilation of blood-group data ever produced, containing as it did the results of blood-grouping tests done on half a million people. And de Chadarevian points out that by 1961 Court-Brown had data on 6000 newborn babies, in surveys that revealed many chromosomal abnormalities. Simply by ramping up the scale of surveillance, Court-Brown created a “potentially explosive public health issue.” Scale mattered to knowledge. Ed Ramsden’s study of two large-population surveys in post-war Britain provides political and social context to make sense of this intense scaling up. Ramsden’s surveyors operated with an assumption that more data were better, and the sheer volume of the data they collected seemed to guarantee its value. Again, as in Radin’s story, there is an expectation of future value and of unknown knowledge. In Ramsden’s story, the National Survey of Health and Development, beginning in 1946, and the Scottish Mental Survey of 1947, were both eugenic in their origins, reflecting fears about differential fertility and mental decline. They were tracking relationships between family size and IQ test scores, in a project that assumed that
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IQ was genetic. The project was strongly supported by Britain’s Eugenics Society, because society members generally privileged heredity in the determination of normally distributed traits and were comfortable with the conviction that intelligence was largely governed by heredity. While the survey results more or less undermined eugenic ideas, shifting attention to educational interventions rather than heredity as a key factor in national stature, they capture the power of Lancelot Hogben’s “political arithmetic,” the idea that mathematics and measurement would bring the social sciences into line with the natural sciences. Studies of human populations, as all papers in this volume make clear, are always both social and natural in framing and impact. Seen from this contextual perspective, the study of human variation entailed broader moral and epistemic concerns, stakes, and curiosities. Attention to human variation and isolated populations was not simply racism. Several intertwined research objectivesdmedical, evolutionary, biochemical, genetic, and physiological, even educationaldcould all be pursued at once, in one and the same research expedition, with a multidisciplinary set of methods, and played out in many publications aiming at different audiences. Field research teams in human genetics and epidemiology expected to be able to answer many questions at the same timedthey were engaged with precious resources that could and should have many different purposes and uses. Like Ramsden’s surveyors, geneticists and anthropologists sought to collect as much data and as many samples as possible. More samples, more broadly collected, was better. The story of twentieth century genetics, then, cannot be told simply through the ideas and vexations of elite geneticists. As the range of papers in this volume make clear, geneticists and their allies and colleagues participated in public health programs, projects of nationalism, Cold War circulation between the global North and the global South, and in the haunted relationships between experts and those they studied on remote Pacific islands, in the highlands of Mexico, or in the ghettos of Rome. Human genetics has been a scientific field fully engaged with the demographic transition, urbanization, post-colonialism and globalization. The papers here therefore constitute a critical intervention in a scholarly field that has until relatively recently been fixed on a set of more narrow questions. The editors of this issue recognize genetics as a screen through which human populations, with all their meanings and import,
were channelled as a resource for the state. As they wrestled with questions of karyotypes, risk, and racial identity, geneticists saw ancient human history and the human future in the karyotype. Genetics as a discipline engaged with both prediction and reconstruction, with the stone age and the atomic age, often at the same time. I will close by suggesting that the historians contributing to this volume perform a related task. Like the geneticists and physicians and other experts they study, the scholars who came together at Cambridge in 2012 participate in a project of biology and culture, to call it by its old-fashioned name, or the politics of heredity. Many of the geneticists we study themselves wrestled with questions that engage us, and our historical reasoning is a resource “in the world” through which pressing tensions around identity and biology percolate. I would suggest that in practice we join with the geneticists, both past and present, not standing in a position of methodological purity safely inside the archives, but rather deeply implicated in the messy details of history that illuminate fraught questions of racialized populations, national power, and the human future. As we contemplate a just-departed century of Nazi racial hygiene, Soviet Lysenkoism, creationism, eugenics, radiation risk, and the atomic bomb, we historians are among the experts struggling to make sense of genetics as a political and social resource. This volume, with its fresh approaches and broad sweep, is a signal contribution to that project.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jenny Bangham and Soraya de Chadarevian, and to all participants at the meeting in Cambridge, for our continuing conversations.
References Petryna, A. (2002). Life exposed: Biological citizens after chernobyl. Princeton University Press. Santos, R. V., Lindee, S., & de Souza, V. S. (2014). Building a site of cognition: Shades of primitiveness in human biological diversity studies in Cold War Brazil, 1962e 1970. American Anthropologist (in press). Washburn, S. L. (1951). The new physical anthropology. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series II, 13, 298e304.
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Discussion
Scaling up: Human genetics as a Cold War network Susan Lindee University of Pennsylvania, Suite 303, Logan Hall, 249 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA
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a b s t r a c t
Article history: Available online 18 June 2014
In this commentary I explore how the papers here illuminate the processes of collection that have been so central to the history of human genetics since 1945. The development of human population genetics in the Cold War period produced databases and biobanks that have endured into the present, and that continue to be used and debated. In the decades after the bomb, scientists collected and transferred human biological materials and information from populations of interest, and as they moved these biological resources or biosocial resources acquired new meanings and uses. The papers here collate these practices and map their desires and ironies. They explore how a large international network of geneticists, biological anthropologists, virologists and other physicians and scientists interacted with local informants, research subjects and public officials. They also track the networks and standards that mobilized the transfer of information, genealogies, tissue and blood samples. As Joanna Radin suggests here, the massive collections of human biological materials and data were often understood to be resources for an “as-yet-unknown” future. The stories told here contain elements of surveillance, extraction, salvage and eschatology. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Human population genetics Genetic disease Public health Radiation risk Race science
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
1. Introduction Over the last century scientists collected and transferred human biological materials of many kinds from one location on the globe to another: from isolated groups to urban laboratories, and from specialized clinics to biological banks. As they moved, these materials acquired new meanings and uses. The papers collected here collate these practices and map their desires and ironies. They explore how a large international network of geneticists, biological anthropologists, virologists and other physicians and scientists interacted with local informants, research subjects and public officials. They also track the networks and standards that mobilized the transfer of information, genealogies, tissue and blood samples around the world. By the 1980s, some biological materials brought into this system had become subject to contested claims of ownership, reflecting emerging ideas about First Nations, indigenous rights and ethical constraints on scientists. Others were seemingly innocent and ethics-free: for example new systems in the 1960s brought all E-mail address: [email protected]. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.05.018 1369-8486/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
industrialized newborns immediately into increasingly linked biological networks of surveillance. There was in these cases often a reassuring consensus (still roughly intact) that collecting and moving human biological materials had a clear purpose, which was consistent with the highest scientific, medical and social goals. As Joanna Radin suggests in this issue, the massive collections of human biological materials and data were often understood to be resources for an “as-yet-unknown” future. There are elements in the stories told here of surveillance, extraction, salvage and eschatology. Making human heredity, the subject of this volume, therefore involved many kinds of labourdfield work, collection, standardization, distribution, and also, as Lisa Gannett suggests, marketing and commercial development. By any measure, the sciences focussing on human heredity expanded in scale during the second half of the twentieth century, hence my emphasis on ‘scaling up’. Earlier work in eugenics and medical genetics tended to focus on collecting pedigrees, understanding how specific diseases appeared in families, or and carrying out comparative studies of twins (work of great import to behavioural genetics). But increasingly, human geneticists adapted the practices and theories of population
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genetics, the quantitative analysis of gene frequencies in identified breeding populations (flies, mice) that were so productive in the evolutionary synthesis. The associated collecting and storage networks built around human population genetics have had enduring consequences, and our historical picture of post-war genetics is enriched by this volume’s intervention. Four overlapping themes run through these papers. First, experts trying to understand human genetics were often engaged in projects linked to race and national identity. The hereditary properties of populations often seemed relevant to the health of the nation, its history, and its future. Certain groups (the isolates within modern nation states) seemed to carry particular symbolic weightdthe Zapotecs who could be brought in to the Mexican public health system, or the Pamir who could, in theory, become modern Soviet citizens. Experts also routinely drew on notions of race and racial classification to explore national and cultural identity, as de Souza and Santos demonstrate for Brazil. Population geneticists made race a robust technical resource for nationalism even as the Unesco race statements, produced by geneticists in the 1950s and 1960s, called into question general assumptions about the validity of race as a biological quality. Second, in a context of post-1945 atmospheric weapons testing, questions of genetic risk appeared and reappeared, justifying national support and validating the medical and moral importance of the study of human heredity. Radiation risk animated many large-scale projects, and these projects in turn generated data that could fuel fears of radiation risk. Genetics was a Cold War science implicated in geopolitics. Third, in this period a standardized technological system with fuzzy and expanding boundaries came into being. Human chromosomes were named and numbered by consensus, with rules about how to squash them, photograph them, and see the differences between them. Systems of neo-natal testing, which depended on commercial technologies, were established in most industrialized nations. The genetic code was deciphered, new genetic markers identified on the human genome, and Victor McKusick began the hard work of cataloguing human genetic disease. One cannot locate the origins of this complex system in any individual institution, lab, national setting, or even disciplinary group. Rather, it was the result of a cumulative process of emerging consensus that reflected technological change, opportunistic field research, and unprecedented funding for genetics research. Cumulatively it was the result of significant and growing interest in the technical elucidation of human heredity. Finally, the sciences of human biology were scaled up in a breathtaking expansion of collection and surveillance after 1950. We have, I believe, not previously fully appreciated how quickly this occurred. By around 1970, millions of research subjects and patients had been enrolled in human population studies focused on heredity. The samples and stories and data taken from them were stored and preserved indefinitely, and indeed many are still stored somewhere, under some regime of standardization and access. The papers here document that this occurreddthey capture the phenomenondbut they do not entirely explain it. I want now to address each of these themesdof nationalism and race, risk and radiation, technological standardization, and scaling updto suggest where they lead us, and to ask what questions they raise for historians of the Cold War. 2. Race and national identity The idea of a nation bound together by biological propertiesda racial nationdhas played a role in human genetics research
agendas for a century. In national contexts with heterogeneous, mixed, and stratified populations, including Brazil, Mexico, or the Soviet Union, even Britain, genetics was conceived as a potential resource for the construction of national identity. The biologically ‘natural’ cluster of the nation was characterized by statistical blood-group variation, by special hybridization practices, or by the presence or absence of meaningful forms of genetic disease. Attention to nationalism and heredity raises several questions: How has heredity functioned both in science and in the broader political and social arena as a surrogate for national or regional identity? How have particular genetic diseases acquired cultural meaning as supra-biological indicators, as markers of history? And what can these stories help us understand about the vexed history of race and racial thinking after 1945? Susanne Bauer explores the striking case of post-1970 genetics in the Soviet Union, as Lysenkoism waned and new enthusiasms for human population genetics emerged. This new genetics had ties to public health but also to national identity, as Soviet scientists studied remote indigenous populations within the USSR. The colonial territories of the Russian Empire were filled with people whose languages, customs, and bodily experiences did not yet conform to Soviet identity. In the Soviet Union, as in other settings, the goals of studying remote or isolated groups included an expectation that scientific contact would overcome their isolation and modernize themdessentially, that it would make them Soviet. The practice of genetics as a part of a civilizing mission underscores the biological properties of nationalism. Soviet medical genetics, Bauer shows, linked the institutional management of genetic and environmental risks to technocratic modernity, in the name of the Soviet Union. In Britain too ideas about genetic heritage were able to mobilize political desires. Jenny Bangham notes that in 1948 geneticists John Fraser Roberts and Cyril Darlington promoted a survey of British bloods. In their appeal to the Nuffield Foundation they noted the rich wealth of potential data accumulating in transfusion centres in the form of donor cards, and worried that these records were threatened with destruction. Britain, they explained, was a particularly important country for the study of human genetic diversity, owing to its “long and stable history, well authenticated records, high racial diversity and recognised genetic gradients”. In the context of a changing empire, biology and blood were interpreted as possible resources for an understanding of British identity. Examining a different national context, Edna Suarez asks how ideas of Mexican nationalism shaped practices in human genetics. Leading Mexican geneticist Ruben Lisker was looking for modern DNA that could define the Mexican nation. He expected his work to bring Zapotec populations into the international world of public health, and by extension perhaps, into the mestizo world of Mexico City. As Suarez demonstrates, Lisker was a provocative culture broker, trained in both Mexico and the United States, whose commitments to medical anthropology and genetics included a dream of a modern and scientifically legible Mexico. The technical details he examined were explicitly historical: Did the presence of 6-PGD (6-phosphodehydrogenase) deficiency and abnormal hemoglobins index a Mexican history of malaria? Or was it a record of a history of hybridization and the slave trade? Like the chromosomes in Lisa Gannett’s accountdin which bits of identity and continental geography appeared to be strewn across the genomeddiseases or deficiencies hitchhiked across the oceans on slave ships, and came to Southern Mexico without a legitimate pedigree, that is to say, without an environmental justification such as malaria. They were outsiders, immigrants, within both the body and the nation. Lisker, therefore, appropriated new biomedical technologies and practices in the study of nationhood, and used diseases to elucidate ideas of Mexican history and identity.
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To see these technologies applied in Mexico is to recognize how much nationalism could matter to a blood sample. That is the image that Suarez’s paper conjures. The vials of indigenous blood and the people they came from both needed to be annexed into Mexican history. Anthropologist Adriana Petryna’s notion of biological citizenship is perhaps here turned upside down (Petryna, 2002) In Mexico, in this case, biology did not become a resource for indigenous groups seeking rights based on biology or biomedical experience. Rather, their blood and its biology enrolled them as citizens in a new vision of the modern state. In their exploration of genetics and race-crossing in Brazil, Souza and Santos suggest how panmixia and miscegenation can to be a part of the expression of Brazilian national identity. After 1950, a long-running narrative about the history of Brazil as a reproductive meeting place, a crossroads of Europe, Africa, and the New World, was scientifically validated in studies of human heredity, gene flows and racial mixture. With populations seen as both unusually mixed and unusually pure, both urban and isolated, Brazil was a “racial laboratory” (on this point, see also Santos, Lindee, & de Souza, in press). It was also a nation with a long history of wrestling with the “race question” in terms of human rights, indigenous land claims, and conflict between the modernizing coastal areas and the inaccessible interiors. Race was clearly a defining element in the historical development of the “melting pot” of modern Brazil. Over and over again, geneticists from Brazil proposed that Portuguese males were unusually “open” to miscegenationda term that in Brazil carries no negative connotations. The celebratory characterization of Portuguese male desire in Brazilian identity egregiously elides, of course, the perspectives, desires or expectations of the indigenous or African women with whom Portuguese men produced children, presumably sometimes through coercion and rape. But it played a role in an image of Brazil as a scientifically informative racial laboratory, like Hawaii, a nature experiment in race crossing. The scientific work on human populations, Souza and Santos show, then fed back into the work of Brazilian national identity. These situations, in the Soviet Union, Britain, Brazil and Mexico, illuminate one key argument in Veronika Lipphardt’s examination of the uses and meanings of variation, population and race. Lipphardt notes that race has generally been perceived to be geographically patterned, transmitted from generation to generation and not easily changed in an individual’s life timedit was the unchanging and underlying property of variation that was of central importance in genetic research. Drawing on Widmer’s notion of “watermarks” in post-war human genetics, Lipphardt tracks the signs of enduring historical concerns with race that have not shifted despite shifts in language. The old ways of talking about human variation were not abandoned after 1950, but transformed. Terms such as ‘gradient’ and ‘isolate’ came to function as ways of describing variation, and these terms could and did function as surrogates for racedparticularly, for example, in Belgian field research in colonial territories of Rwanda, Burundi and Congo during the 1950s. Physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn characterized races as large groups which differ in heredity (Washburn, 1951). Perhaps, but which are the differences that matter, particularly given the qualities of race as a proxy for geography and political power? Jenny Bangham’s attention to convenience sampling documents the ironies of the high-flown language about isolation, purity, and primitiveness that appears in scientific papers in the 1960s about these matters. The British geneticist Arthur Mourant did not mind if his pure and isolated Basques lived in poor neighbourhoods in London. The results of their blood tests could still appear on his maps in Basque territory, because geographical identities clung to
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them and were present in their blood. Mourant, Bangham notes, thought that blood groups “besides having many purely scientific advantages over most other bases of classification” had the merit of providing objective criteria far removed from the traditional marks of ‘race’. Blood groups, he proposed, were objective, pure, and authentic, not like the visual markers of skin or hair. Sandra Widmer, too, notes that populations do not exist unproblematically in nature. They come into existence, she says, as the result of a process of practical and conceptual labour. She focuses on work with groups in the New Hebrides of Melanesia, who in the 1960s were configured as legible social and biological entities suitable for scientific study. The physician and field researcher Carleton Gajdusek and his colleagues operationalized “isolate,” she suggests, both in the field and in their published papers, a process that Lipphardt also explores. “Isolates”, Widmer suggests, were isolated through particular views of culture, and the genetic diversity of isolated populations on islands was connected tightly to a geographic and biological category, called race, or later (as Lisa Gannett demonstrates) “Biogeographical ancestry.” Malaria, which Edna Suarez explores in terms of the history or migration in Mexico, appears here also as a marker of race and history. Gadjusek called for a holistic picture of a group of people but collected medical, cultural and social information in order to contextualize the biological. He imagined that lines of biological descent would coincide with the identity of the group, and that this socio-political group had existed over a long period of time. On the islands where he collected blood samples, he needed to collaborate with local informants to understand relationships within communities. (Bangham notes how often local, and largely invisible, informants decided from whom blood should be taken, as they knew who was “pure”.) But as Widmer suggests the indigenous knowledge was only important insofar as it would allow Gadjusek to further isolate the variations present in the genes. In Gannett’s work we see a cognate processdof continuity by reformulation. Biogeographical ancestry (often abbreviated to BGA) is part of the new world of biomarkets and in her exposition she tracks a practical, down to earth, real-world agenda in crime control, bounded by a “frequency differential (5) more than 50 percent” between “any two major geographically or ethnically defined populations.” Gannett says that BGA is “not a natural kind,” but something else entirely. It is a market share, a patent, and a financing strategy. It is not even a concept, she proposes. “To say that BGA was an invention is to emphasize not that it is an invented concept but that it is an invented technology for which a patent application is pending.” BGA’s inventors and merchandisers, she says, enact “race” as it has been traditionally conceived and constructed as a natural kinddthrough taxonomy, typology, essentialism, objectivity and naturalness. Her explication of a single patent applicationda novel and intriguing use of this resourcedmakes it clear that the category of BGA involves a taxonomy of mutually exclusive classes in which family groups are inside ethnic groups, and ethnic groups are inside continental groups. In consequence the individual genome has become raced in new ways. In this way of seeing things, race is a populational quality that is transcribed at the individual level and the individual genome has “population structure.” Bits of the chromosomes are classified as Indo-European, SubSaharan, Native American or East Asian. The proportions of each determine an individual’s BGAdi.e. the continents are conceptualized in terms of DNA. Her observation about the crime-fighting efficacy of such tests is compelling: the tests work in a circulating feedback loop, in which certain markers dictate social places linked to behavioural expectations. To say that BGA is a surrogate for race is not wholly accurate. Rather, BGA is race embraced and denied simultaneously.
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3. Risk, radiation and the Cold War It is important to recognize that the risks that operated in postwar human genetics included not only the risks posed by global radiation exposure, but also risks of historical change. Many of those rushing to study indigenous or isolated populations expected them to disappear soon and be swept away by the modern world. The loss of these special groups, and of their bloods, was commonly interpreted as a loss to science. Radiation risk joined the risks of modernity to enhance the medical and scientific value of those supposedly unmarked by either. Attending to the ways that experts thought about radiation risk and heredity illuminates several questions: how did the Cold War reconfigure human genetics? What exactly were the various stakes involved in routine genetic testing, particularly of newborns? How did ideas about the evolutionary future of humanitydideas linked to eugenics (although the word is too overcharged to bear the full weight of this discussion) intersect with fears of radiation? Certainly scientific work had the potential to hauntingly validate emerging fears. De Chadarevian’s account of the large-scale epidemiological studies of the Medical Research Council Clinical Effects of Radiation Research Unit at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, under the direction of the radiologist and medical researcher Michael Court-Brown, provides a rich portrait of the shifting values of chromosomes in the study of risk. Court-Brown was one of the first geneticists to embrace large-scale karyotyping, even before new techniques using peripheral blood were available, and his enthusiasm resulted in data collection that revealed relatively frequent (if opaque) abnormality in the human chromosome count. His group promoted projects with a wide reach, applying these new methods of analysis to special populations such as leukemia patients, nuclear workers, and people exposed to radiation at Windscaledthe site of a major nuclear accident in the UKdand to newborns, prisoners, and isolated groups. Damaged chromosomes, Court Brown found, were common in these groups. By tracking Court Brown’s investments in karyotyping, de Chadarevian links newborn screening programs to both disease risk and to the tensions around social class that appear in Ramsden’s account of the post-war IQ surveys in Britain. Newly decipherable chromosomal abnormalities mirrored the chaos and uncertainty of the post-1945 global orderdof nuclear risk, a burning Cold War, and social and economic disruption. The excitement of this early period of chromosomal research, as de Chadarevian reminds us, led to both epidemiological and anthropological studies that enrolled many populations. Ilana Löwy’s account of prenatal diagnosis also touches on questions of risk, radiation, and population health, and intersects with Bauer’s study showing how Soviet geneticists linked prenatal testing to environmental risk. Löwy asks us to consider how and why prenatal diagnosis became genetic diagnosis. How exactly did the complexity of the developing foetus become a genetic problem, when such a small percentage of malformation is genetic (perhaps only four to seven percent)? Löwy proposes that “the association of genetic counsellors with decisions about the continuation of pregnancy after a diagnosis of foetal malformation” contributed to the idea that prenatal diagnosis primarily involved heredity, particularly in the context of public awareness of radiation risk. More than fifty years after the first prenatal diagnoses, she notes, the main ‘cure’ for severe foetal malformation today is the same as the one proposed in 1960: the termination of pregnancy. The identification of prenatal diagnosis with genetics in the professional and lay discourse helps to mask this uncomfortable fact and to maintain a powerful regimen of hopedhope sustained in a context of fear and risk.
This context was also crucial to Soviet genetics. As Susanne Bauer notes, radiation biology became a hidden resource for genetics even in the Lysenko period. The importance of radiation risk justified the use of more mainstream theories of heredity and research in closed research institutes. Nuclear sciences in the Soviet Union included radiation biology, and geneticists working in this context were protected from the general attack on modern genetics. After Lysenko’s influence waned, Soviet genetics rapidly engaged with the broad global project of human population genetics and cytogenetic analysis. Understanding mutation loads and the mutational equilibrium in the population played a key role in field work with human populations, and, as in many other national contexts, geneticists planned comparative studies of chromosome aberrations “in healthy newborns, newborns with congenital malformations, stillbirth, embryos of medical and spontaneous abortions.” At a broader scale, Soviet researchers proposed to monitor mutations by means of examining spontaneous abortions for cytogenetic alterations (to track the same kinds of chromosomal damage that de Chadarevian shows Court-Brown documented) as well as to monitor somatic mutation through studies of peripheral blood in adults. Bauer notes that through these field studies, “parts of Central Asia [became] a techno-scientific backyard to the Cold War.” In this context of collection and storage, how was standardization important to the Cold War assessment of risk and radiation? 4. Standardization Another critical element in the stories told here involves the rise of standards for the management of human biological materials. New analytical techniques suggested a more objective frame for public health decisionsdone that was more logical and subject to greater control. At the same time, the blood sampling collections were the product of a technological system of manipulation of records, reagents, instructions, maps and graphs. The bloods came into being inside a sociotechnical system characterized by a deep consensus. Standardization shaped access, travel arrangements, administration, collection and storage, and procedures for use. Recognized medical phenomena, for example Rhesus blood-group incompatibility or Down Syndrome or Phenylketonuria, led to blood collection programs, which then created standardized databases that could be used in new ways. What does the post-war standardization of chromosomes, gene nomenclature, lab protocols for labelling and storage, and so on, help us recognize about biomedicine in the twentieth century generally? How did scientists navigate this rapidly changing terrain, in which the value of a sample could shift depending on technologies of storage and analysis? Did standardizing practices betray their origins in their structure? Did they reflect the social and political circumstances of their creation? When María Jesús Santesmases looks at the technology of karyotyping, and at the whole system of extracting blood from human bodies and making images as a diagnostic tool, she calls our attention to standardization as a process. The chromosomes she explores were medical chromosomesdextracted in the hospitaldand made available as a result of amniocentesis. The production of the karyotype made the foetus a patient, by making the potential medical state of the fetus visible. Santesmases suggests that karyotyping made cytology clinicaldhuman heredity was reconstructed for cliniciansdso the karyotype facilitated the reintroduction of heredity and genetics into the clinic. She tracks a key and fundamental shift. Originally amniocentesis and karyotyping focused on testing women at risk of giving birth to a child with a specific hereditary disease, because they already had
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an affected child. Gradually, however, the system expanded to test all women of ‘advanced maternal age.’ This transformed prenatal diagnosis, partly because risks in the two circumstances were so different. A disease known to be present in a family posted a 25e 50% risk of repetition, depending on the disease. But the risk for Down Syndrome in women of advanced maternal age was one to three percent. A standardized system, applied to all, reconfigured the nature of risk and the clinical assessment of how and when risk levels could justify dramatic interventions. Her perspectives resonate with Löwy’s proposal of a complex relationship between prenatal diagnosis and congenital malformation. In 1972 the World Health Organization started consultations on Congenital Malformation Reporting, and this played a role in standardizing and institutionalizing the tendency to describe birth defects as “genetic.” Löwy suggests that pediatricians and clinical geneticists were ‘lumpers’: they could have sub-divided abnormalities more sharply into defects arising in gametes, those developing in the embryo, and those which appear later in pregnancy as a result of development, exposure or the general environment. They elected a different path: the lumping together of hereditary and non-hereditary congenital malformation and the maintenance of a strong link between prenatal diagnosis and the polysemic term ‘genetics’. By the early 1970s medical geneticists and anthropologists also contributed to international programs set up by the UN during the Cold War. These projects were largely about ‘methods’, having as one key goal the standardization of procedures and thus long-term data comparability. Mourant, as Bangham points out, was in charge of the Blood Group Reference Laboratory (BGRL) at the Lister Institute in London, which was responsible for standardizing and distributing antisera to blood grouping laboratories, within and outside Britain. In 1950 his lab was officially sanctioned by the World Health Organization (WHO), putting Mourant at the centre of a large international correspondence network. Joanna Radin’s powerful exploration of the standardizing protocols of the multipurpose serum bank highlights the logic of epidemiological surveillance, and the imagined future value of serum banks. She notes that when Yale physician John Rodman Paul froze serum in his early study of antibody patterns in North Alaskan Eskimos, he had an explicit intention of reanalysis at a later date. Paul praised the “unfolding” epidemiological value of the sera, expressing a future-orientation that was central to the surveillance activities and practices she tracks. Radin shows that for the human population geneticists, physical anthropologists, immunologists, and epidemiologists she tracks, these materials had a future value that was unclear and enticing. They also helped to establish systems of epidemiological surveillance that would transcend national borders. Freezers were international spaces, and, again, just as geography clung to the Basques in London in Bangham’s story, and geography occupied bits of DNA in Gannett’s, geography was frozen with the samples, their origins outlined in provenance records and disease surveillance data and also historical relationships and kinships. Collectively the papers here give new meaning to the notion of mapping genes: hereditary material in post-war human genetics was deeply geographical even when it was on its own, isolated from the people to whom it belonged. Radin’s work also highlights the ironies of standardizing practices of collecting, annotating, and preserving samples of blood collected from highly variable human (and sometimes non-human) bodies around the globe. She calls our attention to the Cold War tensions that shaped scientific authority. Unstable governments of recently decolonized nations were presumed to be unable to provide accurate and consistent information about disease and epidemiology. Standardized collections of blood serum, Radin
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notes, could provide politically authoritative evidence for the distribution of infection and nature of heritable and acquired resistance. Radin proposes that in these systems of rationality and desire, WHO is “not merely a place in Geneva, but a distributed network of facilities and standards that has been brought into being through investments in administrative as well as tissue-based infrastructures.” The protocols she tracks had the paradoxical effect of stabilizing blood as a fundamentally unstable, protean, and unfolding resource. Löwy, Santesmases, Bangham and Radin raise fresh questions about the standardizing systems of post-war human genetics. Ideas about the risk of genetic disease facilitated population-based screening for Down syndrome and promised control of the next generation. They also facilitated a sanitized prescription of ‘genetic termination’. At the same time massive standardized serum banks were established at great effort to enable an unknown future to unfold. Bodies, genes, clinical interventions and field practices were brought into alignment in a network of geneticists and other experts who imagined the possibilities of deep control of human heredity. Did genetics function to erase other risks, ease clinical interactions, and diminish parental guilt? Is this a part of the postwar scaling up process? 5. Conclusions: scaling up By any metric, human genetics as a discipline and medical practice was scaled up after 1950. In technology, scaling up refers to the movement of a given method or machine out of a test laboratory, where it is proven to work on a small scale, into industrial production. Usually scaling up requires innovation, because what worked in a single small facility might not in mass production, and new problems of scale emerge as production escalates. We can think of human population genetics as scaling up, from a small boutique discipline in about 1950 (with an incorrect human chromosome number, a limited number of diagnostic insights and few effective clinical interventions or biological tests) to a sophisticated system of collection, storage, surveillance and analysis by about 1980. What innovations did this scaling up require? What complexities did it reveal or create? And how and why did some expectations and assumptions about human heredity and human populationsdincluding powerful notions of race and racial differencedpersist almost immune to the deep and fundamental changes of the post-war period? As many of these accounts make clear, geneticists and their allies undertook extremely large-scale surveys and population studies after 1945. Bangham shows that Mourant’s book was the largest compilation of blood-group data ever produced, containing as it did the results of blood-grouping tests done on half a million people. And de Chadarevian points out that by 1961 Court-Brown had data on 6000 newborn babies, in surveys that revealed many chromosomal abnormalities. Simply by ramping up the scale of surveillance, Court-Brown created a “potentially explosive public health issue.” Scale mattered to knowledge. Ed Ramsden’s study of two large-population surveys in post-war Britain provides political and social context to make sense of this intense scaling up. Ramsden’s surveyors operated with an assumption that more data were better, and the sheer volume of the data they collected seemed to guarantee its value. Again, as in Radin’s story, there is an expectation of future value and of unknown knowledge. In Ramsden’s story, the National Survey of Health and Development, beginning in 1946, and the Scottish Mental Survey of 1947, were both eugenic in their origins, reflecting fears about differential fertility and mental decline. They were tracking relationships between family size and IQ test scores, in a project that assumed that
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IQ was genetic. The project was strongly supported by Britain’s Eugenics Society, because society members generally privileged heredity in the determination of normally distributed traits and were comfortable with the conviction that intelligence was largely governed by heredity. While the survey results more or less undermined eugenic ideas, shifting attention to educational interventions rather than heredity as a key factor in national stature, they capture the power of Lancelot Hogben’s “political arithmetic,” the idea that mathematics and measurement would bring the social sciences into line with the natural sciences. Studies of human populations, as all papers in this volume make clear, are always both social and natural in framing and impact. Seen from this contextual perspective, the study of human variation entailed broader moral and epistemic concerns, stakes, and curiosities. Attention to human variation and isolated populations was not simply racism. Several intertwined research objectivesdmedical, evolutionary, biochemical, genetic, and physiological, even educationaldcould all be pursued at once, in one and the same research expedition, with a multidisciplinary set of methods, and played out in many publications aiming at different audiences. Field research teams in human genetics and epidemiology expected to be able to answer many questions at the same timedthey were engaged with precious resources that could and should have many different purposes and uses. Like Ramsden’s surveyors, geneticists and anthropologists sought to collect as much data and as many samples as possible. More samples, more broadly collected, was better. The story of twentieth century genetics, then, cannot be told simply through the ideas and vexations of elite geneticists. As the range of papers in this volume make clear, geneticists and their allies and colleagues participated in public health programs, projects of nationalism, Cold War circulation between the global North and the global South, and in the haunted relationships between experts and those they studied on remote Pacific islands, in the highlands of Mexico, or in the ghettos of Rome. Human genetics has been a scientific field fully engaged with the demographic transition, urbanization, post-colonialism and globalization. The papers here therefore constitute a critical intervention in a scholarly field that has until relatively recently been fixed on a set of more narrow questions. The editors of this issue recognize genetics as a screen through which human populations, with all their meanings and import,
were channelled as a resource for the state. As they wrestled with questions of karyotypes, risk, and racial identity, geneticists saw ancient human history and the human future in the karyotype. Genetics as a discipline engaged with both prediction and reconstruction, with the stone age and the atomic age, often at the same time. I will close by suggesting that the historians contributing to this volume perform a related task. Like the geneticists and physicians and other experts they study, the scholars who came together at Cambridge in 2012 participate in a project of biology and culture, to call it by its old-fashioned name, or the politics of heredity. Many of the geneticists we study themselves wrestled with questions that engage us, and our historical reasoning is a resource “in the world” through which pressing tensions around identity and biology percolate. I would suggest that in practice we join with the geneticists, both past and present, not standing in a position of methodological purity safely inside the archives, but rather deeply implicated in the messy details of history that illuminate fraught questions of racialized populations, national power, and the human future. As we contemplate a just-departed century of Nazi racial hygiene, Soviet Lysenkoism, creationism, eugenics, radiation risk, and the atomic bomb, we historians are among the experts struggling to make sense of genetics as a political and social resource. This volume, with its fresh approaches and broad sweep, is a signal contribution to that project.
Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jenny Bangham and Soraya de Chadarevian, and to all participants at the meeting in Cambridge, for our continuing conversations.
References Petryna, A. (2002). Life exposed: Biological citizens after chernobyl. Princeton University Press. Santos, R. V., Lindee, S., & de Souza, V. S. (2014). Building a site of cognition: Shades of primitiveness in human biological diversity studies in Cold War Brazil, 1962e 1970. American Anthropologist (in press). Washburn, S. L. (1951). The new physical anthropology. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series II, 13, 298e304.
