If you are teaching Genetics right now, I highly recommend incorporating a day on eugenics and scientific racism. 🧬🧪 Not only is it very relevant to the news (👀), it was very impactful for my students last semester. www.genome.gov/about-genomi...
Eugenics is the scientifically erroneous and immoral theory of “racial improvement” and “planned breeding,”
Learning about eugenics is one of the few thing I remember from my undergrad classes. I now teach a first year seminar on gene editing and we do a week on eugenics and it is one of the most common thing students discuss from the course in the reflections I have them write
Thanks--I needed this prodding
We talk about it throughout the semester. Blood typing, DNA fingerprinting, Eugenics. There’s a CB Davenport paper I haven’t been able to work into a lecture yet but it’s absolutely vile.
speaking of news and genetics, pleeeeease also mention that sex/gender are way more complicated than chromosomes. too many people are attacking trans, nonbinary, and intersex folks.
“The Gene” does a fantastic job narratively connecting the history of genetics and how that flowed toward a distortion into racist/eugenic purposes.
Another good resource: pged.org/resources/ge...
Thanks for giving this lesson to your students and for sharing these resources. I gave a talk about last week about how the evolutionary principles that we are learning in class teach us that scientific racism is completely unfounded, and I went over recent history of scientific racism/eugenics.
christoph: maybe include this 👇 in a forthcoming course mentioning "eugenics" ? the emphasis is on 3rd reich germany, whose "eugenicists" had tight links w/ their US colleagues. (if the author is unfamiliar to you, please ask me for more info. or wikipedia)
STEM students want and need to get the real picture of how science is (mis)used in our every day life. I wanted everyone who left my genetics class to not reduce humanity to genes, while still seeing the power in that knowledge. Not to mention how our humanity drives study decisions.