Human genetics group apologizes for ‘findings’ that justified racism, brutality, sterilizations

The world’s largest human genetics group apologized for some of its founding members’ role in the American eugenics movement and the negative ways they exploited science to justify racism, violence, and sterilizations.

According to The Washington Post, the American Society of Human Genetics’ apology follows an 18-month investigation sparked by the 2020 protests against police brutality. It concluded on Tuesday with the release of a 27-page report in which the organization examined its own history — including how its leaders exploited science to justify racism, violence, and sterilizations — and made suggestions to repair the harm.

The 8,000-member ASHG, which practiced eugenics against Jews, Blacks, individuals with disabilities, LGBTQ+ persons, and others who did not fit into false constructs of genetic fitness and racial purity, was created in 1948 after World War II and the crimes of Nazi Germany.

ASHG “seeks to reckon with, and sincerely apologizes for, its involvement in and silence on the misuse of human genetics research to justify and contribute to injustice in all forms,” its board of directors said in a statement, according to The Post.

According to the group’s report, five ASHG presidents in the 1950s — Lee Dice, Curt Stern, Franz Kallmann, Madge Macklin and Laurence Snyder — supported the forced sterilization of people deemed genetically unsuitable, such as those with physical and intellectual disabilities, hereditary illnesses and mental illness. Claude Nash Herndon, another ASHG president, played a significant role in North Carolina’s eugenics sterilization program, which primarily targeted Black women. 

The ASHG had an inadequate response, their report contends, to claims made by psychologist Arthur Jensen and physicist William Shockley that Black people were genetically predisposed to intellectual disability.

This was particularly true during the height of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, when racists utilized sickle cell anemia and the sickle cell trait to discourage interracial relationships and deny African Americans access to employment, insurance and military service.

It’s also been two decades since the Human Genome Project, which showed that 99.9 percent of all humans had the same genetic makeup. As a result, geneticists agree that “race” has no biological basis and is solely a social construct.

ASHG started making efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in 2017. Since then, it has launched programs for mentoring and training scientists from underrepresented groups, pushed for diverse speakers and topics at its annual symposium, and increased minority representation on its 16-member board of directors, which climbed from 5 percent in 2017 to 40 percent in 2021.

The report’s recommendations urged the organization to do even more to advance diversity and inclusion in the coming years. The specifics, including criteria and goals, will be laid out this year, according to ASHG Board President Brendan Lee, the molecular and human genetics department chair at Baylor College of Medicine.

“The report and its findings are painful,” Lee said in a statement released with the report, according to The Post, “and document a history that must be told and taught so we can prevent a resurgence” of genetic racism.

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