Institutionalized Heredity: Asylums, Statistics, and the Origins of Human Genetics

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IntroductionThis 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 MeritThe 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 ImpactsThis 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.