Making Heredity in Mice and Men: The Production and Uses of Animal Models in Postwar Human Genetics.

Historians as well as practionners often trace the origins of medical genetics to the aftermath of the Second World War. Although experimental geneticists moved away from eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s it is argued that two features contributed to change the study of human inheritance after 1945: on the one hand a more radical departure from eugenic methods and concerns was triggered by strong criticism of the uses of ‘Rassenhygiene’ by the Nazis; on the other hand, the inner dynamics of genetic research as exemplified by the biochemical study of hemoglobin or by the study of the mold Neurospora provided new means for investigating ‘inborn errors of metabolism’ and ‘molecular pathologies’ (Pichot, 1995; Lookard Conely, 1980; Mac Kusik, 1975; Childs 1973). The career of the British geneticist L. Penrose is considered emblematic of this displacement: Penrose was trained in the British tradition of biometrics and eugenics, but in the postwar era he was an influential translator of previous concerns with mental illnesses in the terms of biochemical genetics and chromosomal analysis (Kevles, 1985).