World's largest body of human geneticists apologizes for eugenics role

The dramatic gesture comes two decades after the conclusion of the Human Genome Project, which revealed that humans worldwide share 99.9% of their genetic material. As a result, geneticists have reached a global consensus that “race” is purely a social construct — albeit one with real-world consequences — with no basis in biology. The apology also comes amid a rise in hate crimes and mass killings inspired by white supremacy and conspiracy theories about the country’s demographic makeup.

The society’s decision to apologize follows an 18-month investigation prompted by the 2020 protests against police brutality that culminated Tuesday with the public release of a 27-page report in which it scrutinized its own past and announced recommendations to repair the damage caused over generations.

Among the immediate actions outlined in “Facing Our History, Building an Equitable Future,” the society has removed the name of early 20th century geneticist William Allan from its highest annual award for outstanding contributions to the field. Allan, a North Carolina physician and eugenicist, “promoted sterilizations of individuals with undesirable traits,” according to the report.

Through its participation in and silence about eugenics and scientific racism, the field of genetics has also harmed itself, the report noted.

As the decoding of the genome has led to the great promise of personalized medicine, a lack of diversity among genetic research participants threatens to compromise the discovery of disease treatments, preventive measures and cures, said Brendan Lee, the molecular and human genetics department chair at Baylor College of Medicine and ASHG board president. About 78% of genetic research participants globally are of European ancestry, in part due to the wariness many non-Europeans have toward the field given past harms and a dire lack of diversity among the researchers, the report notes.

The act of atoning for the past is a moral imperative, but it is also intricately tied to the organization’s scientific goals, Lee said.

The latter, he said, “requires that not only we as the researchers, but also our constituents, our participants, the broader community build trust. . . . Because if we don’t repair the sort of the moral challenges that come from our past, it’s very difficult to move forward into the future.”

The Society was founded in 1948, in the wake of World War II and the atrocities of Nazi Germany, which practiced eugenics against Jews, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people and others who did not conform to false notions of racial purity and genetic fitness.

Pseudoscientific racism had, by then, been guided for centuries by deep prejudices among European Americans, who had used it as justification for slavery, brutality and discrimination against those they deemed inferior.

The advent of eugenics, a term coined in 1883 by British polymath Francis Galton and defined as the science of improving the human race “through better breeding,” rested on a similar desire by Europeans to dominate, as well as the pervasive cultural fears of the times.

The movement gained popularity in the United States during the late 19th century and early 20th century, as a rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance led to beliefs that most traits were genetically determined and inherited, the report said. “There were also fears that ‘Anglo-Saxon superiority’ was under threat as immigration from eastern and southern Europe increased and slavery ended in the United States.”

In 1910, Charles Davenport, a Harvard-educated zoologist, established the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island The office surveyed families to study the heredity of attributes, among them “feeble-mindedness,” criminality and alcoholism. Davenport also studied people with both African and European ancestry out of concern “that those who could pass as White would pollute the White gene pool . . . This fear of racial mixing was also a key driver of the ERO’s public advocacy,” the report said.

The office’s superintendent, Harry Laughlin, developed a model law that was used as a blueprint for forced sterilization laws in several U.S. states. By 1931, 30 states had adopted such laws targeting those who were considered genetically undesirable. Nazi Germany was inspired by Laughlin’s prototype, too, the report noted.

In the wake of World War II, Germany’s use of eugenics to forcibly sterilize hundreds of thousands and murder millions had dampened American public and scientific interest in the movement.

The ASHG’s initial mandate was to restore credibility to the field, and yet the report chronicles repeated failures to do so over roughly four decades.

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

Nine of the association’s early leaders served in high offices with the American Eugenics Society, three of them during their tenures as ASHG president, the report said. Five presidents who served during the 1950s — Lee Dice, Curt Stern, Franz Kallmann, Madge Macklin and Laurence Snyder — supported forced sterilization of people deemed genetically unfit, including those with physical and intellectual disabilities, heritable diseases and mental illness. Another ASHG president, Claude Nash Herndon, was a key participant in North Carolina’s eugenics sterilization program, which primarily targeted Black women. He advocated to name the group’s most prestigious award after his mentor, William Allan, in 1961, the report said.

In contrast, the report also highlights the anti-eugenics comments of some ASHG presidents and notes that the investigation did not uncover “activities or positions” that the group as a whole “adopted that directly aided in furthering the eugenics movement.” Yet it said that its leaders did little to block membership or inclusion in forums by people who promoted eugenic theories.

The society also remained largely silent about unethical genetic research and unfounded claims that it targeted people from minority groups after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

For example, according to the report, the ASHG responded inadequately to assertions by psychologist Arthur Jensen and physicist William Shockley — neither of whom had background or training in genetics — that Black people were intellectually inferior due to their genetics. The publication in 1994 of “The Bell Curve,” which made similarly specious arguments about “race” and intelligence, was also met with mixed reaction.

This was also the case during the peak of civil rights struggles in the 1960s and 70s, when racists used sickle cell disease and sickle cell trait to warn against interracial relationships and deny jobs, insurance and military service to African Americans. (The disease and trait, which developed evolutionarily to help protect people from malaria, do not exclusively affect those of African ancestry.)

But the report also paints a portrait of an organization that over the last two decades has evolved to become more activist and outspoken.

In the early 2000s, the findings of the Human Genome Project underscored the rightness of that course.

The unraveled human genetic code does not support the notion of distinct “races” that have been historically assigned to the world’s population — categories devised by those of European ancestry who put themselves at the top of the hierarchy, said Charles Rotimi, immediate past president of ASHG and the scientific director in the inherited disease branch of the National Institutes of Health.

And yet that message — along with the scientific consensus that all modern humans emerged in Africa about 300,000 years before small bands began migrating out about 60,000 years ago — has been slow to penetrate to the public at large, Rotimi said.

“I call it genetic innuendo,” he said. “It is the feeling that these racial categories have some genetic way of defining them, which has never been true.”

The relatively tiny variations among humans can be seen between individuals, families or larger population groups, he said, but “trying to use genetics to define racial groups is like trying to slice soup. You can cut it any way you want but the soup is going to stay mixed.”

However, thinking about humans in terms of genetic race is deeply ingrained and “is very, very difficult to uproot . . . Some people derive advantage and don’t want to let it go,” he said. Others fear they will lose the ability to track the effects of racism.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is exploring descriptors for genetic population groups that might substitute for historic racial groups when appropriate in genetic research. But distinct categories, including those based on ancestry, are elusive due to the genetic mixing that has occurred over millennia.

The concepts of “social race” as well as racism are still important, however, and have real-world impacts, including major ones on health, Rotimi and others agree.

The same genetic research that has the power to revolutionize how we think about ourselves, has also been used to re-enforce racist ways of thinking. Many white supremacists have rushed to take genetic tests to try to prove their superiority, bragging on social media about the ability to digest the lactose in milk, which appears to be genetically linked to livestock domestication in Northern Europe but also in parts of Africa.

And amid a steep rise in hate crimes in recent years against minority groups in the United States and around the world, beliefs about racial superiority and inferiority have been used to justify violence.

The White teenager charged in May with murdering 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket, appeared to have been motivated, in part, by British researcher Michael Woodley, who has asserted a connection between ethnicity and cognitive ability and argued that humans can be divided into subspecies, a cornerstone of white supremacist ideology refuted by the Human Genome Project findings.

“The human genetics community rejects in the strongest possible terms to any attempt to twist and warp genetics knowledge to advance bogus racist ideology,” the ASHG report said, “or try to legitimize through science the fundamental hatred that forms white supremacy’s evil core.”

Beginning in 2017, the society began taking measures to increase diversity and inclusion, launching mentoring and training programs for scientists from underrepresented groups, pushing for diverse topics and presenters at its annual symposium and increasing the minority representation on its 16-member board of directors, which has risen from 5% in 2017 to 40% 2021. The self-investigation was launched by the board in 2021.

The report’s recommendations called on the organization to do even more in the coming years to promote equity and inclusion. The details, including benchmarks and goals, will be mapped out this year, Lee said.

But even as the vast majority of ASHG’s membership — a third of which lives in countries outside the United States — subscribe to the scientific consensus on “race,” there will always be outliers within and outside the group, Lee noted.

And given the long history of genetic racism and categorizing people by “race,” the road toward trust will be an undeniably long one, Lee said.

“I think we all recognize that it’s not something that’s ‘one and done’ at all,” he said. “I think that it’s [about] a continuous engagement and hopefully the trust will be built up over a period of time.”