Screening Out Controversy: Human Genetics, Emerging Techniques of Diagnosis, and the Origins of the Social Issues Committee of the American Society of Human Genetics, 1964-1973

Facing Our History-Building an Equitable Future

This report is the product of a major year-long initiative to acknowledge and reckon with past injustice, as well as progress toward justice, within the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) and the broader field of human genetics. Approved by the ASHG Board of Directors and launched in 2021, the initiative was sparked by the social and racial reckonings in 2020. The ASHG Bboard of Directors asked ASHG to acknowledge and provide examples of how human genetics theories and knowledge "have been used to feed and justify racism, eugenics, and other systemic forms of injustice, and to focus specifically on examples of ASHG's role in fostering or failing to rebuke harms and on steps the Society could take to address findings." The initiative was undertaken with support and input from an expert panel of human geneticists, historians, clinician-scientists, equity scholars, and social scientists and included a research and environmental scan, four expert panel meetings, and a community dialogue as its main activities.

Framing utility: Regulatory reform and genetic tests in the USA, 1989-2000

Before about 1990, insofar as diagnostic and other medical tests were subject to regulatory oversight, it was chiefly to ensure that they met appropriate standards of analytic and clinical validity. Over the course of the 1990s, however, regulatory reformers in the United States began to argue that genetic tests, specifically, should also be assessed to determine whether or not they actually benefit those undergoing testing-whether they possess "clinical utility", as they put it. The present paper asks why this shift in regulatory focus occurred specifically in relation to genetic tests, and why clinical utility became a key object of assessment. It answers these questions by situating concerns about genetic tests in the longer history of medical genetics. Looking back to the 1970s and medical geneticists' efforts to distance themselves from their earlier association with eugenics, it shows that they adopted a particular framing of the dangers of genetic testing which would inform their response to the proliferation of new genetic tests and the growth of commercial testing in the 1990s. In a series of policy committees convened over the course of that decade, medical geneticists called for regulatory measures to be implemented to ensure that genetic tests were only introduced into medical practice if they had been shown to be beneficial to those tested. The paper follows the deliberations of those committees to show in detail how geneticists worked within this framing to accommodate new technical capacities and regulatory opportunities. In the course of these deliberations, they adopted the idea of clinical utility to signify the need for evidence of benefit specifically to those tested. The paper concludes with some observations regarding how this framing of genetic tests relates to current understandings of "genetic exceptionalism" and to more recent articulations of clinical utility.

The Cyclical Return of the IQ Controversy: Revisiting the Lessons of the Resolution on Genetics, Race and Intelligence

In 1976, the Genetics Society of America (GSA) published a document entitled "Resolution of Genetics, Race, and Intelligence." This document laid out the Society's position in the IQ controversy, particularly that on scientific and ethical questions involving the genetics of intellectual differences between human populations. Since the GSA was the largest scientific society of geneticists in the world, many expected the document to be of central importance in settling the controversy. Unfortunately, the Resolution had surprisingly little influence on the discussion. In 1979, William Provine analyzed the possible factors that decreased the impact of the Resolution, among them scientists' limited understanding of the relationship between science and ethics. Through the analysis of unpublished versions of the Resolution and exchanges between GSA members, I will suggest that the limited impact of the statement likely depended on a shift in the aims of the GSA due to the controversies that surrounded the preparation of the document. Indeed, the demands of the membership made it progressively more impartial in both scientific and political terms, decreasing its potential significance for a wider audience. Notably, the troubled history of the Resolution raises the question of what can make effective or ineffective the communication between scientists and the public-a question with resonance in past and present discussions on topics of social importance.