We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The essays in this collection examine how human heredity was understood between the end of the First World War and the early 1970s. The contributors explore the interaction of science, medicine and society in determining how heredity was viewed across the world during the politically turbulent years of the twentieth century.
Ideas and knowledge about the inheritance of physical and mental characters in humans, whether normal or pathological, form one of the most important elements of intellectual and scientific life of the twentieth century. From the heyday of explicitly eugenic projects and programmes in the early decades of the century, to the reconstitution of concerns with human heredity as ‘medical’ and ‘human’ genetics in the wake of World War II, to the campaign to ‘decode’ the human genome at the close of the century: the definition and control of hereditary traits have been a major concern, if not a metaphysical centrepiece, of biomedicine and public health. From our present-day perspective, we identify the scientific – as opposed to medical or political – endeavours in this field with the discipline of human genetics, that is, with scientific practices aiming at the determination of genetic factors affecting human characters. In this spirit, the twentieth century has been referred to, in critical retrospection, as the ‘century of the gene’. Yet not all projects and practices concerned with phenomena of human heredity in the twentieth century were focused on, or even concerned with, ‘genes’. Anthropological concepts of race and ethnicity, for example, continued to have a legacy in human genetics, as did medical ideas about susceptibility or constitutional disposition, and sociological and psychological ideas regarding class, inheritance and ability.
In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the hereditary susceptibility to tuberculosis (TB) was one of the most discussed topics in the field of human heredity. Remarkably, the complex and substantial debates concerning this topic have left few traces in the historiography of science and medicine. The reason for this neglect probably lies in the fact that these debates generated neither unambiguous results nor a coherent methodology. Historians of human heredity have tended to focus on pioneering studies regarding definitely ‘genetic’ human characters, notably those demonstrating Mendelian inheritance. It has to be noted, however, that almost all of these paradigmatic examples – haemophilia, Huntington's chorea or alkaptanuria – were rare, distinctive anomalies that were clearly endogenous. TB, in contrast, was omnipresent, polymorphic and hardly suited to monocausal interpretations. But precisely because the idea of hereditary susceptibility to the disease was so highly ambiguous and contested, it generated a multiplicity of approaches. And since TB was – unlike most ‘classical’ hereditary diseases – one of the most urgent problems of social hygiene, questions about its aetiology concerned a wide circle of specialists and institutions. For these reasons, a look at the practices that informed the TB debate opens up a wider perspective on the meanings of human heredity.
Since National Socialism was an essentially dictatorial system, many historians assume that it tried to impose total control and ideological alignment on all fields of scientific research. Some main features usually attributed to National Socialist science policy are the primacy of race ideology, closing off international exchange, and, above all, the rejection of “pure research” in favor of research that was “useful” for the nation. Ironically, references to research fields that allegedly remained untouched by these ideological guidelines complement rather than contradict this view. Because the Nazi research administration was utterly incompetent and disorganized, some historians claim, there were “free spaces” enabling scientists to pursue their research in relative independence. According to Kristie Macrakis, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology (KWIB) in Berlin was such an island of excellence and “normal” research in an ocean of rigorously politicized science. Under the astute direction of Fritz von Wettstein, Macrakis claims, it was not only able to conduct “pure genetic research untainted by the needs of the government” but also served as a refuge for dissident scientists. It is, however, rather questionable whether “pure research” in the Third Reich was such a heroic endeavor as this interpretation suggests. As Ute Deichmann has shown, research funding was by no means distributed only according to party memberships and “ideological” preferences. The support for the biological sciences was especially generous, and large parts of it were distributed to the elite institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWS).
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.