Introduction

When it comes to critics of eugenics from within the biological sciences, few are as renowned and respected as the British medical geneticist Lionel Sharpless Penrose (1898–1972). It was not simply that he was severe and incisive in his criticism – this was a characteristic he shared with the left-wing biologists J. B. S. Haldane and Lancelot Hogben. Penrose is considered unique in terms of the depth and consistency of his censure. While others may have tempered their criticisms by declaring a determination to distinguish a true eugenics from false, to place it on a sure scientific footing, Penrose identifies the very idea of eugenics to be fatally flawed. He is celebrated for his critique; Deborah Thom and Mary Jennings see Penrose serving as ‘almost the Galileo of genetics, establishing “true science” in the face of the religiosity of the eugenicists’. In more measured terms, Diane Paul sees his position to be ‘a major exception’ among mid-century biologists.

One of the aims of this essay is to complicate this story – but not, as has been so popular in recent years, by attempting to uncover an underlying sympathy for eugenics by another of its famed critics. The power and importance of Penrose's critique will be emphasized as it is further explored.

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.

The Study of Mental Health in the City

The city has long been perceived as a pathological space, a cause of deviance, sickness, and delinquency. Its various social and psychological problems have often been associated with its physical structures and conditions. Perhaps the most famous sociological statement on the city, Louis Wirth's “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” identified size, density, and heterogeneity as resulting in superficiality, alienation, anomie, and various forms of social and psychological breakdown. This chapter focuses on a diverse group of social and behavioral scientists, biologists, psychiatrists, architects, and planners concerned with rectifying the problems associated with urban life. From the mid-1950s they were united in a series of conferences supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), to better understand and control the influence of the environment on mental health and illness. The Committee on Physical and Social Environmental Variables as Determinants of Mental Health, nicknamed the “Space Cadets,” met for two and a half days, twice a year, for twelve years from 1956. The meetings, which were fully transcribed, allow us to examine how diverse scientific and professional communities sought to develop a common language and a degree of unity of purpose in addressing the issues of slum clearance and urban renewal. Many of those involved saw the meetings as having significantly influenced their future research, as John B. Calhoun suggested: “I will leave it to historians to start with the stenotype transcripts of the twenty-three 2½-day sessions and follow them outward.”