This symposium will present research on the transatlantic dimensions of genetics, eugenics and the cultural contexts in which they developed in the twentieth century. Contemporary discussions on medical genetics are now and again overshadowed by the “spectre of eugenics,” the fear that human genetics will lead us into a new era of control over sexual reproduction and the discrimination of genetically “inferior” people. Past political manifestations of eugenic beliefs have given rise to these fears. Eugenics as an attempt to improve the genetic quality of the human race was informed and vitalized by revolutionary developments in biology, genetics and medicine. These scientific insights seemed to promise a new cure not only for a wide range of diseases but also for social problems. Animated by concerns over the welfare and health of the nation, eugenicists proffered solutions to perceived social ills and presented themselves as being capable of breeding a better nation. As such eugenics was a meeting ground between science, society, and public policy.

However, the dominant focus of historians on racial eugenics and on the seemingly “pseudo-scientific” nature of the eugenics movements has prevented us from better understanding the historical meaning of eugenics and its intricate and contested relationships with the biological sciences, the field of genetics in particular. The social applications of the biological sciences have initiated debates about social differentiation, scientific responsibility, medical ethics, reproductive autonomy, and human rights that resonate until the present day.

Multiple discourses converge around the use and adaptation of genetic knowledge in the workplace, the home, and the wider world. The use and abuse of genetic knowledge both before and after the Second World War has raised pertinent questions about the relation between individual wellbeing and national interest, privacy and state control, and, most pertinently, the body and the body politic:

• How did knowledge-claims travel between these discourses, between countries and communities and how were these knowledge-claims translated into the practices of everyday life?
• To what extent did discourses about heredity, genetics and eugenics follow different trajectories in various European countries and the United States?
• How were genetics and eugenics used to construct categories of differentiation and “othering” such as race, ethnicity, normalcy and gender?

By exploring an interdisciplinary and transatlantic approach this symposium aims to place the popular and pervasive movement of eugenics at the crossroads of fundamental debates about the role of the biological sciences as part of the “modernization project”.