ArgumentMoreau (2019) has raised concerns about the use of DNA data obtained from vulnerable populations, such as the Uighurs in China. We discuss another case, situated in Europe and with a research history dating back 100 years: genetic investigations of Roma. In our article, we focus on problems surrounding representativity in these studies. We claim that many of the circa 440 publications in our sample neglect the methodological and conceptual challenges of representativity. Moreover, authors do not account for problematic misrepresentations (...) of Roma resulting from the conceptual frameworks and sampling schemes they use. We question the representation of Roma as a “genetic isolate” and the underlying rationales, with a strong focus on sampling strategies. We discuss our results against the optimistic prognosis that the “new genetics” could help to overcome essentialist understandings of groups. (shrink)

Wasted Chances? The Current Political Debate on DNA Phenotyping and Biogeographical Ancestry Analysis in Criminal Investigation in Germany. This paper discusses diverse understandings of ‘responsible science’ in heated political debates. It takes a current public debate around a German law amendment draft concerning the use of novel forensic genetic techniques, namely DNA‐phenotyping and biogeographical ancestry analysis, as an example. A distinction is being made between an understanding that emphasizes scientific debate and precision, and another one that focuses on political agency. (...) The paper also addresses the question whether and how science studies scholars, given their depth of expertise in the analysis of complex problems spanning disciplinary boundaries, should contribute to national debates in policy fields where no such dialogue exists yet. (shrink)

Images are at the heart of strategies of persuasion. They render certain aspects visible and leave others unrepresented; and they may shape processes of scientific reasoning and imagination. By tracing diagrammatic images in the anthropological sciences throughout the 20thcentury, the contributions to this special issue highlight some dominant pictorial traditions for rendering human evolution and diversity visible. This article aims to provide an overview of and an introduction to the special issue ‘Visibility Matters’.

Critical Interventions in the Life Sciences – not a Task for the History of Science? This brief paper asks whether historians of science – along with scholars from Science and Technology Studies – should intervene if, in their research, they come across ethically and societally problematic behavior of scientists. I discuss whether and how interventions can be made in such a case that go beyond publishing scholarly articles. In contrast to Nicholas Rose, who claims that determinism and reductionism are no (...) longer driving forces in the life sciences and that scholars from history of science and STS should hence form new relationships with life scientists, I hold that such a general understanding of ‘life scientists’ is at odds with the reality of scientific communities. The challenge is rather to find those colleagues in the life sciences who agree with our criticism. At the same time, such discipline‐crossing collaborative interventions need to carefully watch out for responsible communication in all directions. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of the visual culture shared by a number of scientists studying human variation in the first half of the 20th century. This was a time when most scientists shared the conceptual and terminological framework of ‘racial classifications’ to capture the structure of human variation. Clearly, drawings – and later photographs – of people from all over the world constituted a crucial part of the well-established visual culture concerned with human variation. The article, however, focuses on (...) the representational tools for visualizing aspects of human variation that were not so obvious to the eye of the observer. It contextualizes researchers’ strategies of visualizing human diversity within the pictorial traditions of relevant fields, particularly physical anthropology and human genetics. Starting from 1900, the article demonstrates how scientists built up a rich visual repertoire for understanding human diversity, one that integrated maps, tables, photos, drawings, diagrams, family and phylogenetic trees. The representations included abstract and non-abstract elements, but increasingly rested on diagrammatic visualizations. Notably, although these diagrammatic visualizations grew in sophistication and methodological rigor, they were rarely used in academic textbooks. More often, mixed strategies of visualizations – diagrammatic elements integrated into non-diagrammatic images – were chosen as representations for human diversity. In the postwar period, most of those visualizations disappeared from scientific publications, but not from popular media. For the scientific publications, one can argue that a number of scientists paid specific attention to visualizations and their deterministic potential. Some argued that particularly maps and trees were altogether problematic in their visualization of human evolution and human diversity. Others sought out new and better ways of constructing trees and maps to visualize truth-claims about human diversity. Here, diagrammatic elements played a key role. Notably, researchers who employed typological approaches for physical anthropology, and who admitted that there was a moment of intuition in their practices, aspired to meet the demands of mechanical objectivity by establishing abstract inscriptions of their typological assessments. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDurch eine Gesetzesänderung im Dezember 2019 ist im Rahmen von Strafermittlungsverfahren nunmehr der Einsatz des „Forensic DNA Phenotyping“, d. h. von Technologien zur Vorhersage von Haut-, Haar- und Augenfarbe sowie biologischem Alter, erlaubt. Dieser Beitrag diskutiert die Verlässlichkeit, Nützlichkeit und Legitimität von solchen Erweiterten DNATechnologien und damit die Rahmenbedingungen ihres Einsatzes in Deutschland. Dabei wird aufgezeigt wie kompliziert, fehleranfällig, voraussetzungsreich, anspruchsvoll und heikel der Einsatz dieser Technologien in Ermittlungen sein kann, wenn nicht entsprechende Vorkehrungen getroffen werden, und wenn sie nicht (...) auf umsichtig begleitete Einzelfälle beschränkt bleiben. Aufbauend auf dieser Analyse werden schließlich Maßnahmen für die Anwendung und Regulierung Erweiterter DNA-Technologien in Deutschland vorgeschlagen. (shrink)