Past Workshops Heredity I - V

Here you can find announcements and abstracts of the workshops from 2001 to 2009 and links to the Workshop Reports.

 

 

Heredity I, 17th to 18th Century: Heredity in Separate Domains

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This workshop took place at the Institute May 25-26, 2001. Participants agreed that there was no general concept of heredity underlying the discourse of the life sciences in the time period considered. The term itself was still restricted to its legal sense (which it since has lost), and had not yet acquired any biological meaning. Nevertheless, several contributions showed that there existed isolated, well-defined domains which became increasingly structured by the recognition of hereditary transmission of differential characters during the eighteenth century: the definition of specific difference in natural history, the explanation of hereditary diseases in pathology, political organization of colonial societies according to racial characteristics, and the production of marketable strains in plant and animal breeding. Metaphors of heredity, it appears, were not invoked to explain the constancy of species, but rather to explain patterns of variation structuring life at the sub-specific level. Some of the contributions to this workshop have been documented in the institute's preprint series.
 
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Heredity II, 18th to 19th Century: Heredity Becomes Central

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This workshop took place at the institute January 10-12, 2003. It mainly focused on the period demarcated by the publication of Kant's Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen 1775 and Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication 1868. This epoch in the cultural history of heredity was characterized by a decisive development at the end of which stood the identification of heredity as one of the central problems of the life sciences. Parallel to this shift one can observe conceptual displacements: Heredity was conceptualized as a relation between parental and filial dispositions, rather than between over-all constitutions. Accordingly, theory formation began to revolve around the production and combination of traits within a species rather than around its over-all morphology. Heredity implied a peculiar inversion in comparison with early modern conceptions of organic production: while the latter emphasize the vertical dimension of lineal descent —where parental organisms actually make their offspring— nineteenth-century biologists invoked images where the lateral dimension dominates, the dimension of a common reservoir of dispositions, passed down from the sum total of ancestors, redistributed in each generation among individuals, and competing now, in the present, for their realization. Contributions to this workshop have been documented in the institute's preprint series.

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Heredity III, 19th to Early 20th Century: Heredity Theorized

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This workshop took place January 13-16, 2005, and covered the period from Galton's Hereditary Talent and Character (1865, published in MacMillan’s Magazine) to Wilhelm Johannsen's famous paper on inheritance in populations (1903). It dealt with this period as one in which a spectrum of attempts flourished to theorize heredity thoroughly, by means of conceptual, statistical and genealogical analysis. One of the main results of this workshop was that the main categories developed so far by historians in looking back onto this spectrum, in particular those of ‘soft’ vs ‘hard’ hereditarianism, are not able to capture it adequately. The inheritance of acquired characteristics became an open research problem only towards the very end of the period with the Weismannian distinction of germ plasm and soma. What divided different positions on hereditary transmission were far more fundamental dichotomies: Was heredity to be conceived of as a force, or as residing in matter transmitted from parent to offspring? Was there a particular hereditary substance, different from the rest of the body, or did the particles transmitted derive from the body substance? Were there internal constraints limiting the hereditary accumulation of differences in organism, or could inheritance lead to species transformation? Particularly powerful sources for models to deal with these questions were provided by the omnipresent engagement with genealogy and by medicine, with its new agendas of bacteriology, public health, and colonial medicine. Contributions to this workshop have been documented in the institute's preprint series.

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Heredity IV, Late 19th to Mid 20th Century: Heredity in the Century of the Gene

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This workshop was organized in collaboration with the ESRC Centre for Genomics in Society (Exeter) and took place at the University of Exeter December 11-14, 2006. It was devoted to what has become known as the era of ‘classical genetics’, initiated by the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws in 1900. With respect to this event there remains a puzzling historical problem. The time before 1900 had not lacked theoretical conceptions of heredity. On the contrary, it was characterized by a variety of theories of heredity, and many of these had gained a strong footing in those areas of application, agriculture and medicine, that were later to support the upswing of classical genetics. The question, therefore, of what it was specifically about classical genetics that made it gain the upper-hand vis-a-vis alternative theories of inheritance, remains an open one. The workshop took a look at classical genetics that might throw some new light on this question. It focused on the tools which allowed classical genetics to realize a program of experimental intervention to solve the riddle of inheritance. Three classes of such tools can be distinguished: (1) technologies for keeping records, especially of genealogical relationships; (2) model organisms streamlined for the purposes of experiments; and (3) technologies, such as hybridization, but also radiation, for direct intervention with reproductive processes. Such tools often bridged theoretical, disciplinary, and social divides, and the rapid career of classical genetics may well have been due to its power to transgress and conjoin otherwise separate knowledge domains.
 
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Heredity V, Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century

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Description

The Centre for Medical History and the ESRC Research Centre for Genomics in Society
(EGenIS) at the University of Exeter is inviting individual scholars to propose papers for
the forthcoming workshop “Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century”. This workshop,
scheduled for 2-4 September 2010, is part of a series that reflects a long term cooperative
research project between the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG)
in Berlin and the University of Exeter. The project deals with the agricultural, technical,
juridical, medical, and scientific practices through which the knowledge of biological
inheritance was developed, embedded, and transferred in successive periods. The overall
aim is to arrive at a better understanding of the genesis of present conceptions of human
heredity.

With the fifth international workshop, the project is turning its attention specifically to
the post war era, up until the 1970s, when the advent of new molecular techniques paved
the way to the age of genomics. World War II is often referred to by scientists and
historians as a watershed in the history of heredity research. While many of the
significant developments of this era originated in the discipline of genetics and its
laboratory-based research practices, fields such as medicine, anthropology, and
psychology have also developed and maintained their own ways to control and to analyze
human heredity. The conference aims to produce a comprehensive picture of these
various practices and ideas and the political and social frameworks in which they
developed. Participants are encouraged to reflect on the major breaks, shifts, and
continuities in this history, especially with respect to the question how the sciences of
human heredity have affected modern society and thought.

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