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

本项目将重新审视人类遗传研究的起源，包括优生学运动。对人类遗传史的经典描述(从1900年开始)将其描述为基础科学的产物，遗传学首先出现，然后是对人类的应用。该项目将继续进行初步研究，以扩大与人类遗传有关的发展的范围，包括在精神病院、监狱和学校等机构使用统计数据。到目前为止，PI的研究表明了对人类遗传史的另一种解释，在这种历史中，这项研究主要是一项统计和行政努力，而不是被认为是由生物实验室的工作驱动的标准观点。公社将继续沿着这些路线进行研究，以支持这一替代说法，并最终出版一本关于这一主题的书。智力价值20世纪被称为“基因的世纪”，遗传学在21世纪也同样突出。在基因组学时代，对人类遗传的研究在这个项目中变得更加核心。历史学家通常将其理解为基础科学的产物，也以优生学的形式理解为对其的扭曲。PI将决定1900年后优生研究和教义的蓬勃发展，特别是在被称为“缺陷”的脆弱人类群体的研究和管理方面，是否真的是由于新的遗传学。他发现并正在探索一项巨大的努力，涉及在学校、监狱、人寿保险公司，特别是精神病院等机构收集、传播和分析人类遗传数据。对人类遗传的研究主要不是一个实验室领域，而是一个统计和管理领域。潜在的更广泛的影响这个项目将突出当代基因组研究的危险和可能性，特别是从实验室扩展到对集中某些遗传特征的群体和机构的研究。它还为一项科学努力提供了背景，这项科学努力一直既是关于实验室研究和分子技术的，也是关于收集和定量分析数据的。

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.