Human Geneticists Apologize for Past Involvement in Eugenics, Scientific Racism

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) apologized today for the participation of some of its early leaders in the eugenics movement, as well as the group’s failure to acknowledge and oppose other past harms and injustices in the field of genetics.

The apology stems from a yearlong ASHG project that resulted in a 27-page report documenting instances of injustices. They range from ASHG leaders who supported forced sterilization to the organization’s silence when genetics was used to justify discrimination against Black people. The findings are “painful” but need to be shared widely, says Brendan Lee, a pediatrician and a geneticist at Baylor College of Medicine and president of ASHG, which has some 8000 members. {snip}

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Like many groups and institutions, ASHG was galvanized to expand on its diversity and inclusion efforts by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man murdered by a Minnesota police officer in 2020, and the subsequent racial reckoning in the United States. ASHG hired an outside contractor to investigate its 75-year history. The resulting report—also informed by Tishkoff and 12 other human geneticists, historians, clinician-scientists, social scientists, and equity scholars—found that as many as nine ASHG presidents served on the board of directors or presidents of the American Eugenics Society since its founding in 1926 until 1972. And several past presidents supported voluntary and compulsory eugenic sterilizations at some point in their careers.

And although ASHG apparently did not directly aid or promote the eugenics movement, the panel found no evidence that it ever took a strong stance against membership or researchers who promoted eugenic ideals. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that ASHG published statements opposing eugenics theories.

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ASHG also remained silent when genetics was misused to justify social harms in the 1960s and ’70s. For example, some scientists (not geneticists) pushed the idea that Black people were intellectually inferior because of their genetics or allowed misunderstanding of the genetic nature of sickle cell disease to generate discrimination against Black people, according to the report.

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One immediate action ASHG plans to take is to suspend naming its awards after past scientists, given the problematic history of several of them. The society’s most prestigious award, for example, is named after William Allen, a prominent geneticist who promoted sterilization of individuals with “undesirable traits,” according to the report. Beyond that, ASHG says it will continue to promote diversity in the genetics field, which a society survey found last year is 67% white.

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