Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century ed. by Bernd Gausemeier, Staffan Müller-Wille, and Edmund Ramsden (review)

This interesting and expansive edited volume contributes to recent scholarly efforts that have aimed to broaden the history of human genetics beyond a focus on molecularization, DNA, and genes. Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century is the product of the final meeting, held in 2010 at the University of Exeter, in a series of workshops focusing on the cultural history of heredity. This volume features contributions from many notable historians, who set out to explore the racial, statistical, medical, agricultural, hematological, professional, institutional, and emotional aspects of human genetics. In addition to highlighting various facets of human genetics that have been overshadowed by molecular approaches in previous accounts, this book complicates the traditional rise and fall narrative of eugenics, by demonstrating, from many perspectives, the international continuity of eugenic aims and practices after World War II.

The sixteen contributions to this volume are divided into five topical sections. The first, on surveys of heredity, highlights various attempts to make diseases hereditary and genetic before 1960. This includes a study of efforts to demonstrate that tuberculosis had a constitutional hereditary component by Bernd Gausemeier, Philip Wilson’s account of Harry Laughlin’s vision for a human heredity clinic and its ultimate realization by Victor McKusick at Johns Hopkins after 1950, and an exploration by Edmund Ramsden of the antieugenic, and yet progenetic, sentiments of Lionel Penrose in explaining the hereditary basis of mental ability. The second section includes four pieces, by Veronika Lipphardt, Jenny Bangham, Pascal Germann, and Edna Suárez-Díaz and Ana Barahona, that highlight the significance of blood groups and new constructions of human populations in the mid-twentieth century. The authors each highlight the at once conflicting and complementary aims of investigators and local populations in blood research, with a focus on competing applications and promises.

In this volume’s very important third section, the contributors examine the shared tools and interests of researchers across animal genetics, plant biology, and radiation studies, and their significance to the development of human genetics. Alexander von Schwerin highlights the contingent trajectory of animals as model organisms in genetics research, looking at how their use was continuously reimagined by evolving trends. María Jesús Santesmases offers a long-needed account of the international networks that facilitated the move of colchicine from use in plant cytology to human cytogenetics during the late-1940s. Soraya de Chadarevian looks at the adoption of human karyotype analysis for population-wide radiation and genetic studies, as well as clinical diagnosis and analysis, in the decades after World War II. Each of these chapters offers valuable insights on the multifaceted development of human genetics in the 1950s and 1960s.

The final two sections of this volume examine various constructions of genetic disease and the professionalization of human genetics in the mid-twentieth century, respectively. At the intersection of these two themes, Judith Friedman considers the factors that made Penrose’s opposition to “anticipation” so influential, including a preference for statistical approaches at this time and his institutional position as a prominent chaired professor and journal editor. Stephen Pemberton and Diane Paul provide nuanced and insightful accounts of the professional interests that helped to make hemophilia and PKU model genetic conditions. Looking to postwar West Germany, Anne Cottebrune offers a valuable account of the development of institutionalized genetic counseling, which highlights the continued influence of eugenic aims, despite the centrality of individual choice. In the United States, Susan Lindee investigates the emotive debate between postwar human genetics heavyweights Herman Muller and James Neel over the translation of fly results to estimating the mutation risk of radiation in humans. Continuing the theme of professional battles and boundary work, Francesco Cassata gives us a multifaceted account of efforts to solidify Anglo-American human genetics in Italy during the 1940s and 1950s in the context of competing interests from physicians, fascist eugenicists, and...