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Article ID: CBB001421071

Making Blood “Melanesian”: Fieldwork and Isolating Techniques in Genetic Epidemiology (1963--1976) (2014)

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume: 47, Part A
Issue: Part A
Pages: 118-129
Publication date: 2014
Language: English

Publication Date: 2014
Edition Details: Article in a special section: “Heredity and The Study of Human Populations After 1945”

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Blood Human genetics Historiography Malaria Public health Epidemiology Variation (biology) Science and race Ethnology 20th century Islands of the Pacific World Health Organization (WHO)

`Isolated' populations did not exist unproblematically for life scientists to study. This article examines the practical and conceptual labour, and the historical contingencies that rendered populations legible as `isolates' for population geneticists. Though a standard historiographical narrative tells us that population geneticists were moving from typological understandings of biological variation to processual ones, cultural variation was understood as vulnerable to homogenisation. I chart the importance that D. Carleton Gajdusek placed on isolates from his promotion of genetic epidemiology in WHO technical reports and at a Cold Spring Harbour symposium to his fieldwork routines and collection practices in a group of South Pacific islands. His fieldwork techniques combined social, cultural and historical knowledge of the research subjects in order to isolate biological descent using genealogies. Having isolated a population, Gajdusek incorporated biological materials derived from that population into broad categories of `Melanesian' and `race' to generate statements about the genetics of abnormal haemoglobins and malaria. Alongside an analysis of Gajdusek's practices, I present different narratives of descent, kinship and identities learned during my ethnographic work in Vanuatu. These alternatives show tacit decisions made pertaining to scale in the production of `isolates'.

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Article Bangham, Jenny; Chadarevian, Soraya de (2014) Human Heredity after 1945: Moving Populations Centre Stage. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (pp. 45-49). unapi

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