Race and Science: Scientific Challenges to Racism in Modern America

The Roman Campaign of ’53 to ’55: The Dunn Family among a Jewish Community

 95 The Roman Campaign of ’53 to ’55: The Dunn Family among a Jewish Community1 Melinda Gormley “If there’s one thing that’s bound to affect the biological constitution of a people, it’s the mating pattern.” —L. C. Dunn, 19602 In August 1953 L. C. Dunn set off for Italy with his wife, Louise, and their son Stephen and in search of a small isolated community that would become the subject of genetic and anthropological research.3 The family’s central question was, “Does the custom of marriage within one’s own faith have biological consequences?”4 By October the Dunns had chosen a Jewish ghetto community in the center of Rome. They lived among the community members and examined them as research subjects for roughly nine months.5 Dunn, a geneticist, had a sabbatical leave and chose his destination with the intention of spending a productive year doing fieldwork of collecting blood, urine, and saliva samples from human beings to analyze human evolution through population genetics. Stephen was a graduate student of social anthropology at Columbia University and would be conducting dissertation research by analyzing the community’s history, economy, and social structure. Louise participated in their research by acting as “diplomatic head-of-mission and commissary,” gathering demographic information such as surname, residence, and occupation from members of the Roman Jewish community.6 Several aspects of Dunn’s life converged in Italy while he and his family lived among the Jewish community. He had gone there as a result of international racial misconceptions that stemmed from the American eugenics movement, Nazi racial hygienics, and scientific racism. What he got out of his time in Rome was data demonstrating the existence of an isolated, biologically unique Jewish community living in the midst of a larger, predominantly Catholic population. Based on his serological data, Dunn had proof of a point he had been arguing in his anti–scientific racism publications: cultural factors affect human evolution. Combining their biological and anthropological findings, this father-and-son pair summarized their conclusion best: 96  Melinda Gormley We think we have established that the Jews of the Roman ghetto did maintain their cultural and biological identity as a distinct subcommunity within a larger one, and that social forces can shape a man’s biology.7 The following is a history of an early attempt at an interdisciplinary field study of human evolution by a family whose personal and professional lives were intimately intertwined. Dunn undoubtedly performed a significant amount of work on this topic because he was interested in human genetics; however, his son’s personal needs and professional career greatly influenced Dunn. He and his wife were simply concerned parents looking out for their son. The Dunn Family Dunn was a revered mouse geneticist studying development and an effective administrator overseeing various scholarly agencies. After receiving his doctorate in genetics from Harvard University in 1920, he went to Storrs Agricultural Experiment Station in Connecticut, where he performed most of his investigations on poultry. Dunn remained at Storrs until 1928, when he began a lengthy career in Columbia University’s Zoology Department before retiring in 1962. He helped establish the Genetics Society of America and was its first president in 1932. In 1961 he was president of the American Society of Human Genetics. He was managing editor of Genetics from 1935 to 1940 and the American Naturalist from 1951 to 1960. Dunn’s commitment to science permeated beyond his career and discipline. He frequently used his scientific expertise and personal networks as a basis for his socio-political activism. He was a socialist and humanitarian, fighting for civil liberties and against social injustices. In terms of his activism, Dunn’s efforts in helping European political refugees relocate to the United States provided him with an intimate knowledge of the consequences wrought by the Nazi Party’s Nuremberg Laws.8 He was an executive member of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars for its entire duration from 1933 to 1945 and secretary of a similar organization, the Faculty Fellowship Fund, at Columbia University, which raised money from its local community and placed refugees into its faculty.9 Dunn recognized that Nazi propaganda about a “pure” Aryan race had left a lasting impression internationally and that the United States’ powerful eugenics movement and other forms of scientific discrimination had convinced most people that science supported racial inequality. Dunn The...