Working with Dr. Robert Nussbaum of the Dept. of Human Genomes Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Lindee is developing a research plan to understand modern eugenics. This plan includes a study of modern eugenics, 1950 to the present, which includes exploring the implications of the human genome project for future "directed human evolution." She is trying to determine how concerns about human evolution have shaped the development of genetics. By the end of the postdoctoral year, significant progress should have been made on a scholarly study of the problem. As part of the training under Dr. Nussbaum, Dr. Lindee is working with research geneticists in an intense laboratory apprenticeship. She is also working with the Center staff in preparing for site visits, and will attend all administrative and scientific meetings of the Center. With the training and the research which she is undertaking under this fellowship, Dr. Lindee hopes to reshape the way historians, philosophers, and social scientists think about eugenics in America. Provocative recent work on German eugenics suggests some inadequacies of current American scholarship on this topic. This work hopefully will open the field to more productive analysis.
