This project will re-examine the origins of the study of human heredity, including the eugenics movement. Classical accounts of the history of human heredity (from 1900) have portrayed it as an outgrowth of basic science, with genetics coming first followed by its application to humans. This project will carry forward preliminary research that broadens the scope of relevant developments related to human heredity to include the use of statistics in institutions such as asylums, prisons, and schools. The PI's research to date indicates an alternative account of the history of human heredity in which that research was mainly a statistical and an administrative endeavor, rather than the standard view in which it is understood to be driven by work in biology laboratories. The PI will continue his research along these lines to support this alternative account and ultimately produce a book on the subject.
Intellectual Merit The twentieth century has been called "the century of the gene," and genetics is no less prominent in the twenty-first. In the era of genomics, the study of human heredity has become still more central to this project. Historians have usually understood it as an outgrowth of basic science, and also, in the form of eugenics, as a perversion of it. The PI will determine whether the flourishing after 1900 of eugenic investigations and dogmas, especially in the study and management of vulnerable human populations called "defective," was really due to the new genetics. He has discovered and is exploring a vast endeavor involving the collection, circulation, and analysis of data on human heredity carried on in such institutions as schools, prisons, life insurance companies, and especially asylums. Research on human heredity was not mainly a laboratory field but a statistical and administrative one.
Potential Broader Impacts This project will serve to highlight the dangers as well as the possibilities of contemporary genomic research, which notably extends beyond the laboratory to studies of populations and institutions that concentrate certain genetic traits. It also provides background to a scientific endeavor that has always been as much about the gathering and quantitative analysis of data as about laboratory research and molecular technologies.
Modern genetics is a natural science, like physics or chemistry, in many of its research methods, but it is also a human science, like psychology or anthropology, in its implications for how we understand outselves and how we live. More and more, genetics has become allied to medicine, and not least to psychiatry. In the past, human genetics was closely allied with eugenics, a scientific program claiming the capacity to alleviate social problems and improve humanity by biological means. Eugenic means such as forced sterilization are commonly associated with Nazi Germany, where many innocent people were murdered as part of a eugenic program, but eugenic measures were also applied in places like the United States and Scandinavia. Everywhere, "negative" eugenics (the effort to keep certain people from reproducing) was applied especially to the mentally ill and the learning disabled. Eugenic ideas are usually presented as a consequence, perhaps an exaggerated or improper extension, of Darwinian evolution. This study shows that the systematic investigation of human heredity, and especially of inheritance of mental illness and disability, did not begin in biology but among doctors and administrators at insane asylums. The asylums began a period of rapid expansion about 1800. This expansion continued into the 1960s, after which a period of deinstitutionalization" set in in many countries, including the United States. In the early nineteenth century, champions of the asylums argued that most patients would be cured. They supported these claims with statistical tables of patient admissions and outcomes. For a variety of interesting reasons, these cheering results proved unsustainable; indeed they were misleading from the start. As the outlook for cures came to look less favorable, the asylums put more emphasis on their contributons to public health and to medical fitness. Institutionalized patients, supported by state funds, would no longer drag their families into pauperism. Also, as these asylum doctors pointed out, confinement would prevent the mentally ill from reproducing. Since their reports, which included tables of the "causes" of insanity among the patients, often showed heredity as the leading cause of insanity, asylums were already functioning as eugenic institutions as early as the 1850s. Or at least their existence was justified in these terms. That is about a decade before Francis Galton, cousing of Charles Darwin, began to outline his own eugenic ambitions using evolutionary language. Historians and scientists have usually ranked Galton with Gregor Mendel as one of the most important pioneers of genetic science. After 1900, when Mendel's research on peas was at last noticed by prominent scientists, Mendelism became almost synonymous with genetics. It also became highly popular for its bearing on eugenics, which attracted enormous attention after 1900. Scholars have noticed that these eugenic campaigns focused particularly on places for the insane and "feeble-minded," and have attributed this to statisticians and geneticists like Galton, Karl Pearson, and the American Charles Davenport. The asylums, however did not passively absorb Galton's ideas and methods, but had an active role in gathering and intepreting the data on which eugenics rested. Also, we cannot dismiss these efforts as ill-informed responses to genetic science. The statistical side of genetics was as important as its experimental side. While plant and animal genetics were allied most closely to agricultural breeding techniques, human genetics was always connected with medicine. The tradition of psychiatric genetics, which had been going for a century by 1900, remained central to studies of human heredity. The allied fields of human and medical genetics, which gained acceptance in the 1940s and 1950s, depended heavily on statistical techniques developed within psychiatric genetics. The most sophisticated and influential version of this statistical field arose in Germany in early twentieth century. Its most prominent representatives, especially Ernst Ruedin, took leading roles in Nazi sterilization campaigns, and were even involved in the mass murder of psychiatric patients. This research shows how closely genetic science was linked to social and medical institutions. These relations continue in our own time, and the centrality of data gathering and statistics is clear in the "bio-informatics" that has gained such prominence in contemporary genomics. This research reveals the importance of science, not only as it has been done in university laboratories, but also in social and medical institutions such as hospitals and asylums. We find here no sharp divide, hardly a divide at all, between reearch science and what are often called its "applications." Indeed, we find relations of dependence going in both directions. This research illustrates the enormous social importance of science, for good and for evil, and indicates some ways that moral issues may already be at stake in the research itself.
