The emergence of human population genetics and narratives about the formation of the Brazilian nation (1950–1960)

Abstract

This paper discusses the emergence of human population genetics in Brazil in the decades following World War II, and pays particular attention to narratives about the formation of the Brazilian nation. We analyze the institutionalization of this branch of genetics in the 1950s and 1960s, and look at research on the characteristics of the population of Brazil, which made use of new explanatory models of evolutionary dynamics. These developments were greatly influenced by the activities of the Rockefeller Foundation and by the presence of North American geneticists in Brazil, especially Theodosius Dobzhansky. One of the main points of this paper is to show that explanations of Brazilian human genetic diversity constructed in the mid-twentieth century closely followed interpretations that had been produced since the end of the nineteenth century, in which notions of 'racial mixing' played a central role. Even as population genetics was conditioned by nationalist concerns that had long marked Brazilian history, we argue that its emergence and institutionalization was closely associated with global, post-World War II socio-political contexts, especially with regards to modernization projects and growing scientific internationalization.

Shadows of doubt: the uneasy incorporation of identification science into legal determination of paternity in Brazil

“…The foremost example of this strand were studies conducted by geneticists James Neel, of the University of Michigan, and Francisco Salzano, of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. This duo launched their collaboration in the 1950s by tracking far into the Amazon to acquire samples from the Xavante Indians living in Mato Grosso, eventually incorporating Yanomami living between Brazil and Venezuela, as well as indigenous groups in Central America 44,45,46 .…”

“…Fritz Ottensooser, a Jewish refugee whose family had fled to São Paulo, developed mathematical formulas to measure degrees of racial mixture utilizing serological analysis. He was joined by the prolific Pedro Henrique Saldanha, trained at the Universidade do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro, who published a major study of "gene flow from the white population to the black population" 46 …”

Comparing genomic narratives of human diversity in Latin American nations

“…The mathematical methods that permitted a calculation of the proportions of parental population ancestry in admixed populations were developed in the 1930s by a German mathematician, Felix Bernstein, and were first used in Latin America by the Brazilian geneticist, Friedrich Ottensooser in the early 1940s and later in Mexico, for example by the geneticist Rubén Lisker in the 1950s (Souza and Santos 2014;Suárez-Díaz 2014;Wade 2017). Nowadays, genomic science nearly always measures degrees of mixture -with much greater precision and at an individual as well as population level -and the stated aim is usually to contribute to medical genomics.…”

Genetics and Racial Difference in Contemporary Brazil: Haemoglobinopathies, Whiteness and Admixture in Biomedical Literature

“…From nineteenth‐century debates on whether the desired whitened condition for the Nation's future could be accomplished (Skidmore, ), to a shift in perspective in the 1930s that made miscegenation, understood both culturally and physically, a key characteristic of Brazil's national identity (Freyre, ), or contemporary debates on racial inequalities and public policy‐making, the issue of the racial characteristics of the Brazilian population has remained central to Brazilian academic and intellectual circles, as well as in everyday life (Costa, ). Biomedicine, particularly in its articulation with eugenics, genetics and, more recently, population genomics, has historically featured prominently in these debates (Stepan, ; de Souza and Santos, ; Wade et al., ). An example of this visibility is the contemporary work of Sergio Danilo Pena.…”

“…Even when there is no uniformity of specific racial terms used for each group or these terms overlap with those used in the literature of other countries (Kabad et al., ), it is the use of these categories as matter‐of‐fact realities that contributes to the naturalisation of this association. In the case of countries such as Brazil, where there is a long history of describing its population as miscegenated even within the field of genetics (de Souza and Santos, ), those authors who oppose the use of racial categories in biomedical research by emphasising the admixed nature of its population nevertheless still use racial terms, in what Santos and colleagues (Santos et al., ) have termed a process of ‘racialising to de‐racialise’.…”