Making blood ‘Melanesian’: Fieldwork and isolating techniques in genetic epidemiology (1963–1976)

Widmer, Alexandra

doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2014.05.012

Cited by 12 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…Unlike population geneticists, however, they tended to be less concerned with evolutionary 'primitiveness' than by accessibility and the availability of well-validated family histories. Consequently, medical geneticists were as likely to conduct their research among culturally defined 'isolates' living in Europe and North America, such as Ashkenazi Jews and the Pennsylvania Amish, as among more geographically remote populations (Lindee, 2005: 58-89, 156-186;Wailoo and Pemberton, 2008;Widmer, 2014). This shared interest in population isolates was one of the few places where ideas from population genetics intersected directly with the medical geneticists' efforts to identify disease genes.…”

Section: Populations and Disease Genes In The 1950s To 1970smentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding the global in the local

Sturdy¹

2020

Global Health and the New World Order

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Section: Populations and Disease Genes In The 1950s To 1970smentioning

confidence: 99%

Finding the global in the local

Sturdy¹

2020

Global Health and the New World Order

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“…In the 1950s and 1960s, biologists often collaborated with ethnologists and linguists to approach native populations (Lipphardt, , pp. 50–61; Widmer, ). In 1960, William Laughlin explained that there were two steps in the work of a physical anthropologist: approaching the natives in order to delimitate the population to be studied by often collaborating with an ethnologist or a linguist, and the data collection and analysis of anthropological traits (Laughlin, ).…”

Section: Biocca's Epistemologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Ethno-biology during the Cold War: Biocca's Expedition to Amazonia

Cozzoli

2016

Centaurus

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This article focuses on the ethno‐biological expedition to the Amazon headed by Ettore Biocca between November 1962 and July 1963. Biocca, a parasitologist by training, assembled a multidisciplinary team to carry out an ethno‐biological study of Amazon natives. The expedition work covered the natives' customs, myths, chants, diseases and the hallucinogenic compounds and curare they used, and took into account plants and animals common to the Amazon environment. This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the 20th‐century Western approach to the Amazon people and its cultural importance. It sets out to show how Biocca's encyclopaedic work related to the centrality of Amazonia and its peoples in scientific and cultural debates on modernity and Western culture in the 1960s, and how it connects to Cold War anxieties about the disappearance of ‘uncorrupted’ peoples.

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“…They included the Alpha Helix , a floating laboratory managed by the Scripps Institute for Oceanographic Research and funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. In 1972, Gadjusek took the Alpha Helix to collect blood from a range of populations in the island regions of the Western Pacific (Radin ; Widmer ). This work was undertaken in conjunction with the IBP.…”

Section: Fragment 4: Bethesda Maryland 1960s and 1970smentioning

confidence: 99%

Indigenous blood and ethical regimes in the United States and Australia since the 1960s

Radin

Kowal

2015

American Ethnologist

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Blood samples collected from members of indigenous communities in the mid‐20th century by scientists interested in human variation remain frozen today in institutional repositories around the world. This article focuses on two such collections—one established and maintained in the United States and the other in Australia. Through historical and ethnographic analysis, we show how scientific knowledge about the human species and ethical knowledge about human experimentation are coproduced differently in each national context over time. Through a series of vignettes, we trace the attempts of scientists and indigenous people to assemble and reassemble blood samples, ethical regimes, human biological knowledge, and personhood. In including ourselves—a U.S. historian of science and an Australian anthropologist—in the narrative, we show how humanistic and social scientific analysis contributes to ongoing efforts to maintain indigenous samples. [indigenous, biospecimens, science, genomics, postcolonial, ethics, cryopreservation]

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Making blood ‘Melanesian’: Fieldwork and isolating techniques in genetic epidemiology (1963–1976)

Cited by 12 publications

References 26 publications

Finding the global in the local

Finding the global in the local

Ethno-biology during the Cold War: Biocca's Expedition to Amazonia

Indigenous blood and ethical regimes in the United States and Australia since the 1960s

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