Month: September 2017

Genetics and Epigenetics Come Home from the War

Shea Robison History, Philosophy, Policy, Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Excerpt from my forthcoming book Epigenetics and Public Policy The Tangled Web of Science and Politics now available from my publisher here and at Amazon

As discussed before, prior to World War II there were substantial geographical differences in the approach to and the understanding of genetics: There was the more European emphasis on embryology and on the processes of biological development which focused on the environment of the genes, in contrast to the emerging American focus on the genes as ultimately controlling development and heredity. These were the two main currents of biology that Waddington, with his feet planted firmly in both streams, attempted to combine through his postulation of the epigenotype and epigenetics. Eventually, though, the American-led emphasis on molecular genetics carried the day to become the sine qua non of biology in the West, relegating embryology and development to secondary status.

This outcome is usually portrayed as the product of the inevitable and impartial progress of science, but the material effects of the Second World War and its aftermath on the particular trajectory of the science of genetics are rarely considered. When these factors are taken into account, the inevitability or incontestability of this increasingly reductive focus of genetic research—including the decades-long exclusion of epigenetic mechanisms—are brought into question.

Other voices, other rooms

For example, the development of the science of genetics in France after World War II initially followed a substantially different path than in America.[1] Although the French genetics research program eventually merged into the international mainstream of molecular genetics by the mid-1960s—in part for the reasons to be discussed in a subsequent section—this initial development of a distinct and yet still fruitful focus provides a counter-balance to the conventional story of the inevitability of the gene-centric focus of molecular genetics as we now know it.

Genetics in France, as lead by the Russo-French geneticist Boris Ephrussi, was much more focused on the combination of embryology and genetics. Ephrussi, who was appointed to the first chair of genetics in France at the University of Paris after WW II, had, like Waddington, been initially trained in embryology but had also studied genetics in America under T.H. Morgan. After the war, Ephrussi discovered the non-Mendelian inheritance of deep physiological changes in cells, and other evidence of the significance of the cytoplasm in heredity.[2] Given these empirical results, Ephrussi pushed for the cytoplasm to be a focus of French genetics specifically against the American preoccupation with the nuclear gene.[3] Ephrussi  famously expressed his dissatisfaction with the distinctly Americanized position that heredity was exclusively controlled by the genes writing that “we cannot determine the truth of a hypothesis by counting the number of people who believe it.”[4]

Regardless of the efforts of Ephrussi and others to maintain a distinct concentration for genetics research in France, they were ultimately unable to resist the rising wave of the focus on molecular genetics emanating from America—coincident with the solidification of U.S. geopolitical hegemony.

Follow the money

In this context, especially given the dramatic ascension to superpower status of the United States following World War II, the distribution of the funding for scientific research in the postwar bipolar world constitutes a significant and often overlooked factor in the development of genetics and the virtual exclusion of epigenetics.

Until the first World War, most scientific projects around the world were funded by wealthy patrons, private benefactors, or industry, with only modest support from governments. Government support for science increased somewhat through the 1800s but never constituted much of an influence. After the first World War, government funding of science increased but was still not a significant amount, and even private sources of funding support for science had dwindled (for example, in 1931, total grants from American foundations amounted to just over $50 million, by 1934 it was $34 million, and by 1940 it was only around $40 million [5]).

With World War II, though, all of this changed dramatically—especially in the United States. Vannevar Bush, an engineer and vice-president at MIT, with a one page proposal and a fifteen minute meeting with President Roosevelt in June of 1940, was able to secure the funding for the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) to coordinate scientific research on “the problems underlying the development, production, and use of mechanisms and devices of warfare.”[6] The NDRC was then superseded a year later by the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), also overseen by Bush, which by 1946 was allocated in excess of $536 million from the Emergency Fund of the President for projects of all kinds, including the Manhattan project to develop the first atomic weapons.[7]

In the waning days of WW II, Bush submitted a report to President Roosevelt called “Science: The Endless Frontier” in which Bush proposed the continued funding of science by the government at wartime levels, but without the shackles of military utility.[8] In particular, Bush identified what he called “basic research,” or “research in the purest realms of science” without concern for direct application, as the proper focus of the government funding of science. “Scientific progress on a broad front,” Bush wrote, “results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.”[9] However, Bush also explicitly painted this scientific superiority in the light of maintaining national security, as the best defense against aggression. Congress eventually agreed with Bush, and created the National Science Foundation according to his recommendation.

As detailed extensively by Daniel Greenberg, Bush’s insistence on federal patronage for the definition and advancement of scientific knowledge in the United States was a dramatic departure from previous funding practices, which eventually came to characterize federal science policy after World War II—bringing with it substantial political and ethical concerns.[10] The scale of the government funding of science only escalated after the onset of the Cold War, quickly becoming the new norm as universities competed for this funding to fuel “the steepest expansion of higher education in American history (if not the whole world).”[11] For example, by 1953 the federal funding in the U.S. for ‘basic’ research alone was over $256 million, and federal research contracts constituted more than 90% of the annual operating budget of MIT.

The sheer magnitude of the funding available for science in the U.S. at this historical moment after World War II and at the beginning of the Cold War is especially extreme when compared with the situation in Europe where, for example, as part of the Marshall Plan the U.S. was in the process of spending $12 billion ($120 billion in current value) to rebuild the infrastructures and economies of Europe. In other words, at this crucial historical moment in the development of the science of genetics, substantial financial resources for scientific work were readily available to those involved in promoting a distinctly molecular and atomistic focus for genetics. In contrast, those who were developing alternatives to this molecular focus in Europe not only had to conduct their work within demolished infrastructures being rebuilt with substantial material support from the U.S., but also had to appeal to external sources primarily from the U.S.—where molecular genetics was the emerging consensus—for much of the funding for their scientific work.[12]

The road not taken

Again, in the context of the development of the orthodox science of genetics, which practically excluded epigenetics for so long, the question of who had access to money and resources for research and who did not is very much a live issue. While the gene-centric focus of molecular genetics is now often perceived as the obvious and inevitable victor over other potential alternatives, these financial factors, combined with the geographical, political, and ideological factors discussed before, instead describe a drastically lopsided playing field.

All this is not to say that mainstream genetics is therefore invalid, to be replaced by epigenetics (if anything, I hope this history has demonstrated just how inseparable are genetics and contemporary epigenetics). Rather, this is to suggest that the ascendance of the molecular emphasis of genetics that developed from out of this historical moment—including the decades-long omission of epigenetics—was contingent on many other factors beyond purely scientific considerations which influenced the science and the research of this time. Had it not been for this particular convergence of factors, the science of genetics which resulted after World War II may have been significantly different, even potentially incorporating epigenetic mechanisms into its basic theoretical frameworks sixty years or more before the recent explosion of interest in epigenetics. If epigenetics had been incorporated into the orthodoxy of genetics at this earlier time, as it very well could have been given other circumstances, then not only would it not be as controversial as it is now, but we would also already be sixty years beyond the advances in our understanding of gene function which we are just now gaining from the recent work being done in epigenetics.

 

[1] Burian, R. M., Gayon, J., & Zallen, D. (1988). The singular fate of genetics in the history of French biology, 1900–1940. Journal of the History of Biology, 21(3), 357-402.

Burian, R. M., & Gayon, J. (1999). The French school of genetics: From physiological and population genetics to regulatory molecular genetics. Annual Review of Genetics, 33(1), 313-349.

Gayon, J., & Burian, R. M. (2004). Timeline: National traditions and the emergence of genetics: the French example. Nature reviews. Genetics, 5(2), 150.

[2] Ephrussi B. (1953). Nucleo-cytoplasmic relations in micro-organisms: their bearing on cell heredity and differentiation. Oxford.

[3] Sapp, Jan. (1986). Inside the Cell: Genetic Methodology and the Case of the Cytoplasm. In The politics and rhetoric of scientific method: Historical studies (Vol. 4), Schuster, J. and Yeo, R.R. eds. Springer Science & Business Media.

[4] Ephrussi (1953); This line by Ephrussi was actually a paraphrase of an earlier comment by the philosopher of science J. H. Woodger—a close friend of Waddington and also a member of the Theoretical Biology Club at Cambridge—who wrote elsewhere that “Admittedly, some hypotheses have become so well established that no one doubts them. But this does not mean that they are known to be true. We cannot determine the truth of a hypothesis by counting the number of people who believe it, and a hypothesis does not cease to be a hypothesis when a lot of people believe it.” [Woodger, J. H. (1948). “Observations on the present state of embryology”. Symposium of the Society for Experimental Biology. 2 (Growth in Relation to Differentiation and Morphogenesis].

[5] Neal, H.A., Smith, T.L. and McCormick, J.B., 2008. Beyond Sputnik: US science policy in the 21st century. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press.

[6] James Phinney Baxter III, Scientists Against Time (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1946), p. 14; draft of order attached to undated, unsigned memorandum in OSRD Box 212.

[7] Stewart, Irvin (1948). Organizing Scientific Research for War: The Administrative History of the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Boston: Little, Brown and Company

[8] Bush, V., 1945. Science: The Endless Frontier: a Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research, July 1945. United States Government Printing Office.

[9] Bush (1945).

[10] Greenberg, Daniel S. (2001). Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

[11] Kaiser, David. (2011). The Search for Clean Cash. Nature 472 (7341), pp. 30–31.

[12] Strasser, B. (2003). The transformation of the biological sciences in post‐war Europe. EMBO reports, 4(6), 540-543.

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Epigenetics and the Cold War

Shea Robison History, Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

Excerpt from my book Epigenetics and Public Policy The Tangled Web of Science and Politics now available from my publisher here and at Amazon

Biology in the USSR

Although Russian biology before and after the Russian Revolution had a much different slant than American and even British biology, and was centered more around evolutionary biology, genetics did eventually become an accepted aspect of science in Russia. Notably, this acceptance of genetics began in earnest only during the early years of the Soviet period,[1] and quickly became a strong research program (for example, until 1934, the Soviet Union was second only to the United States in publications in genetics[2]). However, within a decade genetics was almost entirely discredited in the Soviet Union and by the 1940s genetics was replaced by a much different paradigm which incorporated both Lamarckian notions and epigenetic-like ideas, though with some important differences unique to the Soviet circumstances.

One important material factor which influenced the direction of the development of Soviet biology along these lines were the waves of famines experienced in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. In the desperate quest for relief, the Lamarckian theories of the biologist Vladimirovich Michurin and the agronomist Trofim Lysenko were swiftly promoted to prominence as offering more immediate means to increase agricultural productivity. These theories were premised on the idea that external modifications to plants (such as grafts) and to seeds (such as vernalization, or soaking them in water) were passed on to subsequent generations via some mechanism of inheritance, suggesting a very limited role for genetic heredity and natural selection in biology.

These Lamarckesque theories also allowed for the politically useful display of immediate, purposive action in the face of crisis. In fact, one of the primary Lysenkoist critiques of genetics during this period was of the length of time required to implement biological change according to genetics, and even just the time it took to select the right varieties for genetics experiments, which could take months if not years.[3] To wit, a government decree in 1931 declared that to warrant continued support government-funded cultivation projects must produce new varieties within 4–5 years, which was half the time required for conventional methods used by the geneticists.[4] That Lysenkoists could promise results in a much shorter timeframe than their counterparts working in genetics only added to their political advantage vis-à-vis the geneticists.

Lamarck and Lysenko

Again, though, although Lysenkoism had both Lamarckian and epigenetics-like characteristics, in many substantial ways it was neither, and thus should not be confused or conflated with either Lamarckism or contemporary epigenetics.

On the one hand, neither Lysenko nor most Lysenkoists referred to themselves as Lamarckians. Instead, they preferred to describe themselves as Darwinists, juxtaposing themselves against the Western Neo-Darwinists. For example, while at this time there were dozens of Russian translations of Darwin’s writings, there were only a couple of translations of the work of Lamarck, and in journal articles of the time Darwin was referred to more than 25 times as frequently as Lamarck.[5]

Further, when Lysenkoists did refer to Lamarck, it was usually just to praise the revolutionary nature of his ideas and not for any scientific purposes. DeJong-Lambert describes how during the watershed 1948 meeting of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union at which genetics was officially banned in the Soviet Union, one of the speakers observed that “As is known, Lamarck’s theory arose in connection with the ideas of the French encyclopaedists and the French materialists. It reflected the revolutionary epoch of that time,” and that just as “the reaction against the French Revolution also caused a strong reaction against the ideas of Lamarck,” so also were the reactions against Lysenkoism proxies for reactions against the Russian Revolution.[6] Thus, references like these to Lamarck and Lamarckism primarily functioned to cast geneticists in the role of counter-revolutionaries, as “regressive absolutists who feared ‘enlightenment,’” more than to declare a specific filiation of Lysenkoism with Lamarckism.[7]

Regardless, and with the explicit and public support of Josef Stalin, Lysenkoism was sanctioned by the Soviet state as the only correct theory of evolution and biological development,[8] while genetics and Darwinian natural selection were officially discredited as bourgeois and fascist, with many geneticists being imprisoned and perhaps even killed.[9] This ‘housecleaning’ in biology mirrored the purges that were occurring in other domains of Soviet life as well during this time, which were also so often couched in the context of ideological opposition to the West.

Ideology and biology in the West

However, this conflation of biology with ideology was occurring on both sides of the Cold War which was then just heating up, though in much different ways and to different degrees. For example, geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the premier architects of the Modern Synthesis, identified the motivations of many in the West who were then portraying Lamarckian heredity as part of some sort of “communist plot” in biology as being less about the actual science involved and more about their own particular ideologies.[10]

As to why Lamarckism was being so closely linked with Marxism, Dobzhansky suggested ulterior motives for those who were stoking fears of Marxian biologists hiding “under every laboratory bench” during this time.[11] According to Dobzhansky, by identifying as Communists anyone who did not condemn Lamarckism as an “enemy” doctrine in biology, these alarmists were seeking more to intimidate into silence potential opponents of their own particular research focus, as well as to express their preferred social and political interpretations of that biology, rather than to clarify the actual scientific issues involved.[12]

As will be shown, this politicization of biology in the West before and during the Cold War was to play a significant role in the development of the science of genetics in the West over the subsequent fifty years, particularly in the prejudice against epigenetics—which also helps to explain the recent and seemingly sudden (re)emergence of epigenetics within the last decade or so.

Genetics and the Cold War in the U.S.

In the West, there were at least no official state edicts against epigenetics-like ideas or imprisonments of epigeneticists like Waddington solely for their scientific claims. However, it is also clear that in the chilled and virulently anti-Communist atmosphere of McCarthy-era America, the Soviet support for Lysenkoism and opposition to genetics played a significant role in the prejudice against theories in biology which proposed more interaction with the environment than was allowed by the exclusive gene-centric focus of the Modern Synthesis.

In fact, it is no exaggeration to observe that the scientific discussion of these ideas in the West often mirrored the vitriolic political rhetoric of the time. One historian of this epoch in science characterizes the reactions by many prominent biologists and geneticists in the West to alternatives like Waddington’s epigenetics as “strikingly similar to the tenor and the rhetoric used by Lysenko and his followers” against genetics in the Soviet Union, providing a litany of examples of the “dogmatic,” “derisive,” and at times even “fanatical” opposition to such ideas.[13]

The political and ideological reactions in the U.S. towards epigenetics-like ideas during this time are themselves significant enough for an entire book of their own. However, what is clear is that this connection between the politics and the science of this time left an indelible imprint on the subsequent development of the science of genetics. As such, two examples of the substantial risks to reputation and career which accompanied even just the reluctance to completely denounce unorthodox theories will be presented as demonstrations of the very real chilling effects of Cold War geopolitics on the development of the science of genetics in the U.S., and on the prejudice against epigenetics which endured for decades.

[1] Gaissinovitch, A. E. 1980. The origins of Soviet genetics and the struggle with Lamarckism, 1922-1929. Journal of the History of Biology, 13(1), 1-51.

[2] DeJong-Lambert, W., 2012. The Cold War politics of genetic research: An introduction to the Lysenko affair. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.

[3] Carlson, Elof A. 1981. Genes, radiation, and society : the life and work of H.J. Muller. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

[4] Roll-Hansen, N., 2005. The Lysenko effect: undermining the autonomy of science. Endeavour 29(4), pp.143-147.

[5] Kouprianov, A.V., 2011. The ‘Soviet Creative Darwinism’(1930s–1950s): From the Selective Reading of Darwin’s Works to the Transmutation of Species. Studies in the History of Biology, 3, pp. 8-31.

[6] DeJong-Lambert 2012.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Graham, L.R. 2004. Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. A Short History. Cambridge University Press.

[9] Adams, M. B. (1991). “Through the looking glass: The evolution of Soviet Darwinism.” In New Perspectives on Evolution, edited by L. Warren and H. Kropowski, New York: Wiley-Liss, 37-63.

Wrinch, P. N. (1951). Science and politics in the USSR: the genetics debate. World Politics, 3(04), 486-519.

[10] Dobzhansky, T., 1959. Evolution, Marxian biology, and the social scene. Science, 129, pp.1479-1480.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] DeJong-Lambert 2012.

The Progressive Movement, Genetics, and the State

Shea Robison History, Policy, Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Excerpt from my book Epigenetics and Public Policy The Tangled Web of Science and Politics now available from my publisher here and at Amazon

The Progressive movement in the U.S. arose in large part as a direct reaction against the social conditions and the politics of the Gilded Age in America (which roughly corresponds to the Victorian era in Britain). The Progressive movement is today known primarily for its concerted efforts to eliminate political corruption, particularly as the untoward relationships between industrialists and government officials, and in curtailing the influence of political machines at the state and local levels. In focusing on changing these political relationships, the Progressive movement thereby aimed at a fundamental reordering of the political system, while at the same time advocating for a reordering of society. Not surprisingly, these political changes also coincided with fundamental changes in the prevailing understanding of biology.

Woodrow Wilson, political progress, and evolution

A prime example of the extent of the penetration of this Progressive ideology into politics and policy, and its connection with the biology of the time, is provided by Woodrow Wilson.

In his 1913 book The New Freedom: A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People, which was also the campaign slogan for his 1912 presidential campaign, Wilson more explicitly identifies the convergence of this Progressive view of policy as a science with the appropriate principles from biology: “All that progressives ask or desire,” Wilson wrote, “is permission—in an era when development, evolution, is a scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”[1] Wilson specifically intended this application of Darwinism to government as a critique of the principles on which the U.S. Constitution was originally founded, as “a variety of mechanics…founded on the law of gravitation,”[2] which were inadequate for the new age which was then emerging. “The trouble with the theory,” Wilson continues, “is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.”[3]

In other words, Wilson and other Progressives were calling for a fundamental reconception and reorganization of American politics based on the metaphor of organic evolution, and specifically a Darwinian and not Lamarckian conception of evolution. As an example of just how profound a shift Wilson imagined, consider this extended excerpt from The New Freedom:

We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political formulas do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.[4]

In other words, the Progressive view as articulated by Wilson saw itself as a fundamental break with the society and the politics—and the science—of before.

Progress, individualism, and the rise of the administrative State

In particular, Wilson identified the founders’ reservations about direct democracy, subject as it was to the popular passions and whims. These misgivings about democracy were manifest in the Constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers, which Wilson and other Progressives saw as an impediment to efficient and responsive government. Instead, Progressives like Wilson proclaimed their dedication to individual autonomy, direct democracy, and a government freed from the constraints of institutional checks that is finally responsive to the will of the people. Paradoxically, though, Wilson and many other Progressives also insisted that for this enhanced individuality to be realized, government must play a larger role in society in order to preserve these economic and political freedoms, specifically via the work of unelected technical experts in the government bureaucracy. In this way, the political successes of Progressivism ushered in the rise of the administrative and regulatory state.

A little known fact—outside academic public administration, that is—is that Wilson had earned a Ph.D. in political science and wrote some of the seminal works in the field of public administration, such as “The Study of Administration.”[5] From this and other academic writings, Wilson is considered one of the founders of the field of public administration.[6]

“The Study of Administration” describes this Progressive emphasis on objectivity and rational planning through Wilson’s assertion of the politics-administration dichotomy, or that public administration is or should be outside of the “hurry and strife” of politics.[7] According to Wilson, “administrative questions are not political questions,” and that “although politics sets the tasks for administration, it should not be suffered to manipulate its office.”[8] Instead, the actual conduct of government, as distinct from the subjective contests of popular politics, is the proper domain for an objective “science of administration…to straighten the paths of government, to make its business less unbusinesslike, to strengthen and purify its organization, and to crown its duties with dutifulness.”[9] The civil-service reform underway at this time (Pendleton Act,[10] etc.) was an example of this Progressive scientization of government, but this for Wilson was “but a moral preparation for what is to follow [in] clearing the moral atmosphere of official life by establishing the sanctity of public office as a public trust, and, by making the service unpartisan, it is opening the way for making it businesslike.”[11]

Science, eugenics, and the new State

However, although most standard political histories of this era focus primarily on the political innovations of the Progressives, this movement was also marked by a very strong undercurrent of imperialism, race and class-based discrimination, and eugenics.[12] Wilson’s own virulent racism, even for his time, is now practically beyond dispute[13]—as evidenced, for example, in his resegregation of the civil service and the military.[14]

As a result, for all the public good proclaimed by this progressive emphasis on scientific objectivity and rationality in public policy and administration, in practice the Progressive political movement inclined itself to rather authoritarian and outright eugenic purposes. On the one hand, making policy a matter of scientific knowledge and expertise meant that only a relative few would be qualified to make administrative decisions. On the other hand, as described by James Scott, this Progressive impulse to improve society through the application of science was both boundless in its reach, and also tended to focus primarily on specific segments of the population:

Every nook and cranny of the social order might be improved upon: personal hygiene, diet, child rearing, housing, posture, recreation, family structure, and, most infamously, the genetic inheritance of the population. The working poor were often the first subjects of scientific social planning…Subpopulations found wanting in ways that were potentially threatening—such as indigents, vagabonds, the mentally ill, and criminals—might be made the objects of the most intensive social engineering.[15]

Changes in politics, changes in biology

As such, the Progressive movement in the U.S. represented a convergence of forces across all aspects of society, combined with the enhanced penetration of this new administrative State into society. Notably, these new Progressive politics were in turn informed or at least justified by the new theories emerging in both the social and the natural sciences concerning the essential biological constitution of individuals.

In contrast to the Neo-Lamarckism upon which the laissez-faire politics of the Gilded Age were based, the Progressive movement increasingly invoked Neo-Darwinism and the emerging science of genetics to explain and justify their political goals and actual policies to set the State up as the primary adjudicator of fairness in society.[16] There are scientifically justifiable explanations for this move from Neo-Lamarckian responsiveness to the nonadaptiveness of Neo-Darwinism and genetics within science, which explanations constitute the conventional scientific histories of this era. At the same time, though, this change outside of science in preferences towards the opposing account of biology also makes political sense, per the guiding model of this project, as a strategic move against an entrenched ideology premised upon Neo-Lamarckism.

Genetics and the new Progressive State

As such, the political program of the Progressive movement, including its ethnocentrism and discrimination, were increasingly justified through references to Darwin and genetics, and not to Lamarck. In turn, it is not without consequence that—regardless of the reasons—at this critical moment in the development of the science of genetics the Progressives lent increasing support to Neo-Darwinian theories of neutral mutations disconnected from the environment, and not to Neo-Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits. It is also of consequence that this difference would go on to become a defining distinction of the new genetics—which is a primary reason epigenetics is so controversial today.

Although obviously the science itself cannot be made to shoulder the blame for these political uses of it,[17] this intersection of the rise of Progressivism with its advocacy of the new administrative State, and the commensurate rise of Neo-Darwinism and genetics in science should not be taken for granted in either political or scientific histories. Although it is obviously too much to say that the political context alone accounts for the emergence of the science of genetics as we now know it, it is surely also too much to say that this political context had no effect on the development of the science. Instead, what seems clear, per the guiding model of this project, is that the politics and the science both evolved together and influenced each other.

The political implications of this intertwining of the new administrative State and the science of genetics will be the primary focus of the next chapters.

[1] Wilson, W. (1913). The New Freedom. New York, New York: Doubleday, Page & Company.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Wilson, W. (1887). The study of administration. Political science quarterly, 2(2), 197-222.

[6] Hood, C. (2000). The art of the state: Culture, rhetoric, and public management. Oxford University Press.

[7] Wilson (1887), p. 210.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., p. 201.

[10] https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=48

[11] Wilson (1887), p. 210.

[12] Miller, T. J. (2012). Freedom, history, and race in progressive thought. Social Philosophy and Policy, 29(2), 220-254.

Paul, R. (2013). Progressive Racism. National Review. Retrieved 15 August 2017, from http://www.nationalreview.com/article/345274/progressive-racism-paul-rahe.

Leonard, T. C. (2016). Illiberal reformers: race, eugenics, and American economics in the Progressive Era. Princeton University Press.

[13] Schuessler, J. (2015). Woodrow Wilson’s Legacy Gets Complicated. Nytimes.com. Retrieved 15 August 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/30/arts/woodrow-wilsons-legacy-gets-complicated.html?_r=0.

Fuller, S. (2016). Making Moral Judgments from a World-Historic Standpoint: The Case of Woodrow Wilson. Society, 53(3), 315-318.

[14] Yellin, Eric S. Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America. UNC Press Books, 2013.

[15] Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. Yale University Press, p. 92.

[16] Engs, R. C. (2003). The progressive era’s health reform movement: a historical dictionary. Greenwood Publishing Group, pp. 115-117.

Happe, K. E. (2013). The material gene: gender, race, and heredity after the Human Genome Project. NYU Press, pp. 4, 26-24, 46.

[17] For example, historian Thomas Leonard describes T.H. Morgan as “the only geneticist to reject publicly the eugenicist idea that socially undesirable traits were the product of bad heredity,” so work in genetics obviously did not determine this combination of Progressive ideals and eugenic beliefs. However, by the same token, Morgan appears to have been relatively unique among geneticists in his denunciation of eugenics, and although Leonard describes how eventually most prominent geneticists distanced themselves from the eugenic organizations they once embraced, they did in fact originally embrace eugenics. (Leonard, T. C. (2005). Retrospectives: eugenics and economics in the Progressive Era. The journal of economic perspectives, 19(4), 207-224.)