 Thank you, Zach. I am honored to reintroduce Marius Torda, who is a professor at Oxford Brooks University and director of its Center for Medical Humanities. He is also co-convener of this symposium. So with that, I'll say over to you, Marius, for our last question and answer session. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. I've greatly enjoyed these two presentations and I realize we have some extra minutes for the Q&A for this session. So then with the permission of my colleagues, I just want to highlight two elements here because they were, I think, very important and we glossed over, but we never had time to discuss it properly. And I'm very pleased that my colleagues from the Holocaust Museum have highlighted that, particularly in the film that it was shown. So the first one is about the importance the Nazi regime placed on the family. And it was clearly, we saw that the family was at the center of the Nazi regime's demographic and eugenic program. So that's one thing. Secondly, the marriage of healthy German women and men was promoted. And as Mark said, the welfare strategy is devised to encourage German families to have more children. So you have a very important and sustained conversation about the negative eugenic practices of the Nazi regime. But I think it's equally important to highlight their positive, if appropriate term here, eugenic policies. So that's one thing. At the same time as the museum, the collections and the exhibits clearly point out the family research and the heritory health of the family were popularized in well attended exhibitions. And the museum has in its collections examples of those Nazi exhibitions that travel to the US. And I want to mention this, I think it's important historical detail. An extremely important public health exhibition was organized in 1935 in Berlin. The Wanda of Life. Wanda of Lebanon, as they called it. And that important exhibition traveled to the United States of America. And it was shown across various places. And it's interesting that actually it was an important discussion about what happened with that collection. So they had the whole positive aspects of Nazi public health policies. And you mentioned very well in your presentation, some of that that were particularly related to tuberculosis. But also, of course, the exhibition explained very clearly to the American public, the Nazi civilization program and the disastrous consequences as they put it of allowing the reproduction of defective individuals. So I wanted to add to be more to that wonderful presentation of yours about this and in connection to public health. I think something that needs to be said as well in connection to the Nazis is the successful war on cancer they they promoted according to a very good book written by Robert Proctor. So we know that the discussion about the causes of cancer and how it could be treated. And particularly the relationship that public health Nazi officials put on preventing and campaign banning basically in some cases smoking and drinking seen as causes of cancer. It's very eerie, of course, for us now to look back to anything the Nazi deed and reinterpret that with when we when the assumption of positivity. But it's important and I'm very, I was very excited and pleased to see your presentation. Leah and Kathleen and Mark because you're able to put together these aspects, which are of course very controversial. And it's not easy to put it all together and you explain very well I think how you you you you translate that into explaining to visitors and people visiting any young people and how do you use that in the classroom. So, with that in mind, I, we could, we could move to a conversation about these two important papers and two important institutions. And the first comment I have and then I'm going to pick some collections. Yes, thank you. Thank you for that. Lingley and that's very important. We teach about these aspects of the history of eugenics and Nazi eugenics in connection to the Holocaust, I think it's essential. It's essential to younger generation, of course, part of the civic engagement, learning about the past remembering, but it's also important to other generations who are not familiar with that part of history that part of the world and so on so forth. And I think there are many ways to do that. The Holocaust Museum has a long history of doing that properly. You know, you can explain the views of individuals involved in these activities as you do some prominent scientists or writers or politicians. You can discuss their ideas or the doctrines associated with political and social movements as you present it today. Or we can discuss the controversy over not, not worthy issues, important issues as Zach presented in his paper. So that's, that's one aspect or you could highlight the distinct feature of a period. We look at the 1930s and then what happens, of course, after 1939 with the outbreak of the Second War and the onset of the Holocaust, or you look at the country or countries as it happens under German occupation. So, in other words, what I'm saying what I realized and I particularly liked in your presentations is that you highlighted both the elements of continuity but also the discontinuity and how that could be put together. So the first question I have to all of you is how, how can we do this in a way that allows us to tell a very complicated story, but at the same time remain in a way truth, remain truthful to the principles that guide the institutions that we represent. We've fully embraced certain ideas and we can explain it very clearly, other issues are more complicated. And Zach pointed out very clearly and goes back to something what Director Green said in his opening remarks. This is the first time basically that a conference on eugenics is being organized but National Institute of Health, of course, which is extraordinarily important. So, if we can reflect a bit on these issues that is about engagement, it's about teaching, it's about memory. It's about the role of the institutions, then it's something that we could pick up from what we left it in the previous discussion we had about the exhibitions, and then we could see what this takes us. So who wants to go first. I can start if you don't mind. So yeah, I think like in developing our resources and obviously Marius as you mentioned, you know, we're the genome Institute, you know, we represent the NIH. So like, I think one of the things that we really tried to focus on in developing our timeline our fact sheet was obviously the history of eugenics is huge and it covers so many disciplines it covers so many social spaces so many institutions just beyond science even. And I think what we really tried to hone in on is the sort of genetics and genomics and genomics is obviously a very new field compared to genetics but trying to stay as much focused in as we could on the arguments that eugenicists were making relying on Mendelian inheritance and how those were misinterpreted by our bad interpretations of that science at the time, and how we've come to know it, and trying to get keep our, our timeline specifically focused on bringing that that heredity, the heredity and the genetics back to every part of what we were trying to convey to our audience is something that we were really trying to go for and stay true to our Institute and tell the story in a way that felt true to our Institute. I think maybe we have a couple of examples from the museum. First, Catherine can talk a little bit about faculty, faculty seminar that's very shortly upcoming that touches on this topic. And then maybe Mark you can talk a little bit about how you formulated those collections very mindfully in terms of how you included the story of eugenics among other things so Catherine do you want to maybe start to be happy to. So we have an upcoming 2022 Jack and Anita has faculty seminar, and the purpose of the seminar is to bring together scholars from the field of history bioethics, public health and medicine to discuss ways that we can from an interdisciplinary perspective about the Holocaust and its implications, long term implications on the various fields that we see scholars teaching it in. And so the goal here right is to think about not only the legacies of Nazis uses and abuses of scientific knowledge on the extent to which we can teach that in the classroom. But then also to dig a little bit more deeply into ethical lessons that we can learn from the Holocaust ways we can see the implementation or lack of implementation of lessons from the Nuremberg trials in the Nuremberg code. And then also just more specifically with a recent concerns around pathology and disease and covered what some of the public health concerns today. What we can draw on from the Holocaust to better understand treating vulnerable populations and or access to treatment and vaccines. So we open this space that's a small 20 person seminar for faculty to really learn from one another to learn from some experts in the field. We also have both Patricia Haber Rice who's the senior historian at the museum and has done a lot of work on the T4 campaign as one of the seminar leaders and then also also Matthew Winia who comes in from the University of Colorado and teaches both in the bioethics and directs the bioethics program and also works in the School of Medicine. So this is one of the ways that we're trying to sort of expand to the influence of the use of our resources in a pedagogical way. Thank you. Mark, would you like to ask something please. Yes. Thank you. Now, the question about how to effectively teach these complicated subjects is so difficult to answer I think because the context is always different depends on the audience you have in front of you. It depends on the amount of time you have on the resources you have available on on your students access to technology etc. And so when crafting the collections for experiencing history we had to take into consideration the very particular, you know, specificities of this tool, what it allowed us to do and what it didn't. We generally have about 12 to 15 individual items within each collection and several collections within a larger section. We have collections on public health and on medical providers, therefore only can have about 30 total items in them, and we can't do justice to the complex fabric of this history with 30 items. We can't claim to be, you know, exhaustive and encyclopedic here in that limited amount of resources what we can do, however, is elevate representative sources from multiple perspectives. And that's what we alluded to in our presentation. And that's what we tried to do with these collections. You mentioned Robert Proctor's excellent book the war on cancer, which was very influential to me as I was starting to conceive of these, because it did cast into this interesting light, how there seems to be kind of a positive and a negative to nearly every Nazi public health policies. Marius you had said how difficult it is for us to conceive that there may have been these seemingly positive aspects or any sort of progress made for for the betterment of people's health because we know how terrible Nazi policies were for so many. And it's like the flip side of a coin, they devoted resources to one group at the expense of the others, or, in fact, thought that others not only, you know, could be neglected but were a direct threat and so targeted those groups, and that in turn, they received benefits at least to a selected population. And that's an incredibly complex concept to get across. We didn't want to simply leave students with the knowledge that they may have arrived with that that not see public health policies neglected at all, that the Nazi view of the world targeted people in certain ways and marginalized excluded and ultimately led to genocide. But we wanted to show how much more complicated these things were so we included sources that showed exercise used for propagandistic purposes in this seemingly positive light like the video you've seen, as well as Hitler youth training and the kind of expectations for young men and the exercise that was prescribed for them, according to the regime's kind of paradigms. We also included, let's see photographs of exercise used as punishment and public humiliation in prisoner of war camps. We also included testimony from a Jewish man recalling how a doctor in a Jewish ghetto went to great lengths and significant personal risk to secretly treat those with infectious diseases because the German authorities were known to just destroy contagious disease hospitals and the patients alive often. Because again, they cared not for these populations, but we're worried about the potential threat that they saw adjacent populations having to their chosen population the so called folks combined shaft that area and race. We're trying to provide this really kind of wide ranging array of different perspectives and complicate the picture for students, you know, on the one hand the photograph of prisoners of war being forced to do push ups in the snow and rags. And on the other we have a photograph of an event at the Berlin beach where a public group is being led in in calisthenics and it looks like something very relatable to audiences today I think. And these all stemmed from the same basic philosophy which is really hard to understand and so we tried to provide this this wide variety in order to be representative, because we can't really do justice to such a complex history with our tool. But we recognize that we're just one one kind of tool in the kit, so to speak, and hopefully with the work of our colleagues and the other divisions of the museum were able to provide a more well rounded picture. Well, thank you for this wonderful answer. Thanks to all of you and I completely shared that and it connects to some of the discussions that's going on in the chat that obviously on the one hand, we have this image of the Nazi period in the Nazi regime we grew up with or in some cases like in my case in my grandparents, my grandparents suffered. They were in camps and obviously for me is completely different story altogether whenever I talk about the 1940s. And it's the same I suppose too many Americans whose grandparents were escaped maybe likely or didn't from the clutches of Nazis and so that's one thing but of course the discussion is so complex and the education is a perpetual mechanism. You know, people come and go new generation of of young students are arriving and there is this impetus to to update the message to integrate more aspects of it. And that's never easy and that connects to something that I want to bring Zach into, which is that he mentioned at some point is also public historian. But that's I think it's crucially important in this conversation. How do you combine your archival work and all of you do amazing archival work but at the same time you do, do have that at a capacity if I may call it like that you act as a public historian and I think that's that's equally important and I want to maybe shift a bit the gear here and turn my attention to this important element of your work which I don't want to diminish in any way because I think it's crucially important as well. And maybe you could tell us something in connection to how you relate that to the work you do for the institutions and then, in turn, and this is something I pick up from the chat. What the intra institutional work now is happening. I mean this imposing is one example of these two institutions working about this particular aspects of history and I think there are many other examples, and I'm curious to see whether you see here a possibility of crossing boundaries and pushing, pushing the baton on to newer and more provocative and daring subjects. Who wants to go first. Can you start. Yeah, sure. So, could you kind of just rephrase the question for me one more time please. Simply put, it's just about the role of the public historian and the importance you or and your colleagues attached to it in addition to archival work. Yeah, no, no, thank you. Yeah, I mean I think like the way I think about it is I mean we've been mentioned several times that you know this history is so immensely complex there's so much there. And I think what really gets up comes across effectively to like a general audience or like a more public audience that doesn't have a strong background or an awareness of some of these subjects which admittedly like I'm not a trained historian of eugenics like I've only really been studying it since I came to the institute with with Chris Donahue but I think what really connects is just finding the individual stories whether it is of individual eugenicists or persons individually affected by by these policies by these practices and really leaning into those stories and telling as much as possible as opposed to the sort of bigger narratives of a national movement or a global movement and really like for example I mean most of the work I've done at the Institute studying eugenics has been studying Robert Cook who's come up several times. And I think just through kind of pulling kind of studying his individual story as a case study you can just pull so many threads out of the larger eugenics movement into like a pretty. I don't want to say neat but like linear narrative on how it's evolved over the past century. And I think just by focusing in again on like individual stories like that you can really, really gain a lot of understanding for the public. Thank you. I can say from the museum's perspective and the group you're hearing from here really focuses on the undergraduate classroom and to a certain extent the graduate classroom which I guess as a way of kind of is a different version of general public if that's the way we want to think about it. One thing that we've really thought about a lot is you know in what what type of resource and what type of context makes sense so I think a lot about what Mark was just talking about in terms of what are different resources can and can't do. I want to highlight one thing that we did in the past year or so that was very much geared towards our student general public and probably a wider general public as well and that was a short 20 minute. It was a recorded lecture that our colleague Dr. Patricia Haber Rice pulled together together in conversation with Dr. Lutz Kalber that really talked about eugenics kind of on both sides of the Atlantic so to speak so really thought about what was going on Nazi Germany and even pre Nazi Germany as well and what was going on at the same at that same moment in the United States and in many cases the communications between the two and that was really meant to be something that was as short as we could make it as digestible as we could make it that again certainly doesn't give an exhaustive history but is sort of one way in or at least a place to start and Catherine's link to YouTube video right there and we also linked it to a number of other museum resources so we're kind of always looking for what's the right door in and what's kind of kind of peak people's curiosity to learn more because no one thing no one article no one collection no one lecture is ever going to explain this history in full right so it's a way of finding multiple points of connection I think. So it's a two pronged approach I suppose you try to teach them more about Nazi eugenics and not developments but the same time you try to teach them something about the connections between American and German eugenics. Which of course some people may know something about American eugenics but I think it will be quite surprised to know how close connected some American eugenics not all but some. Where with a Nazi eugenics and how they promote it I mean you know the famous Nazi psychiatrist and one of the creator. Of the Nazi civilization law and routine. Comes to New York of course in 1932 to the second internationally generally Congress and he's he's elected president of the International Federation of eugenics organizations promoted by Davenport and other important American eugenics so by then of course. The routine is in America to promote what will become the Nazi version of sterilization. And of course he was very keen to explore the possibilities of how they can learn from the American examples and from American civilization programs. And there's of course there is an entire literature on these connections, as you will know, but I suppose for the general public and for younger people to teach about this is probably. A bit of a shock, a bit of a sobering moment when they realize that some of these connections were actually very well established. Mark, were you next in line. So you want me to move to the next question. No, I take just a moment to echo what Zach and Leah have said I think that when trying to present these very important but complex ideas and this history to general audiences and the work of a public historian. It's not just around considerations of accessibility relevance and interest. Zach mentioned individual stories, which is a strategy that that we've seen time and again, helps people to connect to complex history. Somebody's reading something and can latch on and actually imagine that this person was experiencing this and it wasn't simply, you know, some sort of inevitable march of time history is so many too many people think of the past. But instead, you know, a very present and immediate flood of choices in quick succession, and that things turned out the way they did but they didn't necessarily have to. I can tell that very well through individual stories, keeping it accessible and digestible is really very important. We need to remember at all times that most of our audience doesn't have, you know, the, the sort of academic background in these topics to to be bringing the same sort of base knowledge about these events or political systems or what have you. And so it's a challenge to try to provide that context, but to do it in a brief enough way so as not to, you know, tire out the reader or the listener and and to maintain interest until you get to that really more compelling part of the story. So I think Zach's point about individual stories is really excellent and Leah mentioned that things need to be digestible, and the audience needs to see some sort of relevance in them even if it's not as direct as the link between German and American thinking on eugenics principles. But, but even if it's more of, of just something that harmonizes with an interest that the audience might have something that's relevant to their lives in some way that they can actually, you know, see themselves struggling with. I think that that really helps to pique people's interest and makes the lessons that much more easy to digest. Thank you. Could I have really quick. Is that okay. Yes, of course, go. Yeah, just one one quick point. Yeah, I really agree with all of that. And I think one way to sort of approach eugenics maybe from an educational standpoint again from to someone that maybe doesn't know much about this history is to sort of pose an organic argument, which I think in some ways makes it like so like why it never seems to go away like wouldn't it be great if we could get rid of diabetes, for example, or wouldn't it be great if we could get rid of this disease, and sort of like pose that as like an opening and then start to unpack the history of like, well, you know, this takes you down all kinds of rabbit holes that eugenicists have gone down historically, you know, and just kind of start to unpack the history in that way to like, yeah, approach something from them like a kind of modern relevant perspective, and just kind of go backwards to like kind of understand all the complexities and problems that arise from something like that, in terms of eugenics. Thank you that squares very nicely with one comment made here in the chat and I want to raise this with you if I have your attention. And one, one person says with, I don't know the person's name, but he or she or they contributed greatly to this conversation and posted very important comments I want to salute that contribution. Anyway, so here we go it's it asks us to the following how can we help educators hold the tension between the desire to move quickly in this moment of reckoning and the reality that the complexity of this history, and it's deeply embedded nature one yield to a few good lessons or quick fixes. Mark, you already alluded to an answer to this question in your final comment or previous comments, but I think that's that's something that we could all reflect quickly and maybe provide an answer to the comment is much longer here and I can't regrettably put it all to you. But I think this is one important question we can pick up from this comment and now take if we have time maybe one or two more before we close this so who wants to to answer that. Yeah, no one. And that if nobody's jumping in that a very short answer could be incrementally, I think is how we do this. We can't ever really hope to do justice to the vast complexity of these very difficult concepts in a brief amount of time, but we can introduce the most important elements of them, then we can build on that knowledge. If we have more time with our audience, or we'll peak their interest enough to inspire them to pursue their own education further on to the subjects. Yeah. Thank you. No one else. Okay, I can, I can raise two more questions, perhaps, although I suppose you may not feel necessarily obliged to answer, because the nature of it but I will raise them anyway but before I move to that I have a comment, which I want to highlight from Robert's rest, he says, it is important, of course, connecting to our conversation about the Nazi and US relationships to to make sure that we don't create the impression that eugenics was bad because of the links to the Nazis. Eugenics is bad, even if it were a better world where the Nazi never existed. So, I suppose we need to bring that forward now. One question. Interestingly, although it might seem weird, it is connected to what Mark highlighted in one of his comments, and then he was substantiated and added by by Zach and is that how do we tell this story. There was a comment in the chat, which feel free to answer if you can, I will probably pick up later on in the general conversation is the following you could be a eugenicist and will be a racist. And there are many eugenicists were in races, the way you define racism, I think, but another level of conceptualization mark I suppose it goes back to the conversation we had about Nazi public health. We can find any positivity there in Nazi public health and Nazi medicine that is not genocidal is not racist. And I think that the conversation and the question comes from this corner of our debate whether we could, and we should accept that they were eugenicists who were in races. That's a good point of course they're not easy to discuss but if you feel in any way you could add something to this, by all means please intervene and say a few words. Yeah, I could start. Yeah, I mean of course that that's true and I'll swing back to Robert Cook again who I've studied extensively, who doesn't write about race, and it is very, very, you know, conscious to avoid it. But I guess what I would say is, regardless if you're sort of proposing or eugenic policies or practices, you are making a value judgment that is going to be imposed on other people regardless of whether or not it's race based class based, whatever. It's still in some ways denying like the autonomy of someone, whether it's someone with a genetic disease or genetic disorder, you're making a judgment that is affecting this person without their them being really involved in the decision necessarily and and that's problematic. Regardless that that's what I would say. That's that's a very, that's a very good answer Zach thank you. Yeah, yes I'd agree with Zach. Certainly it's. There are examples in the history of eugenicists who did not ascribe to racist beliefs. In the German context, Magnus Hirschfeld the the pioneering sex researcher and early advocate of LGBTQ plus rights. He comes to mind, he was a genesis to advocated for the sterilization sterilization of certain people with disabilities, but was an egalitarian on racial lines and was considered progressive for his day. In the German context, in the 1920s and 30s genetics was referred to as racial hygiene, though, and so, as Zach mentioned, even if it's not specifically racist, making these sorts of value judgments based on whatever classification or parameters you want to ascribe to a person is like to say the least. And in the German context, because of the terminology applied and the specific understandings of that around the notions of race, it's hard to disentangle after a certain point if somebody could actually be an active eugenicist without maybe not being personally racist but contributing to that racist system in some way, or the development of it, because they began to become rather entangled, say the least. Thank you. That's something we haven't touched on but I'm happy. You mentioned Magnus Hirschfeld of course and I personally done some work on Jewish genesis in Eastern Europe and of course it is extremely problematic. And it's very difficult to read their texts, how they promote eugenics in the 1920s, and many of them ended up in Auschwitz in the 1940s. And to see that, you know, they were absolutely and a very anti racist of course very much against German ideas of racial purity, German ideas of racial supremacy. However, in the field of sexual reform in the field of public health, social hygiene, they promoted a lot of eugenic ideas, not only within the Jewish communities but at society and large as physicians in countries such as Romania or Hungary or Poland. And of course that's an important aspect of it. And in relation to race and racism and eugenics of course, again something we haven't discussed and I just want to briefly mention is the complex conversation going on in other parts of the world. I mean if we think of Central America or South America, of course a discussion about race and eugenics is very different in many ways it is in Germany or in the US. And again that adds just to salute those of us or those amongst us who are working on other parts of the world. But the story of course in the relation between racism and eugenics is a very different one or better said it's a more complex one than people generally assume. So thank you. Thank you, Mark for that comment it's important you brought that example in I think I think I need to check the time. Okay we have a couple of more minutes now the questions and the comments are flowing in and I just want to ask something that may or may not be, I suppose, in your jurisdiction as it were, but a lot of us are wondering of course whether politics plays any role in the way institutions react to change when they come to terms with certain historical moments in the past. And of course, the comment, one of the comments in the chat was about recent political developments in America in recent terms of the past, say, seven eight years. What is any political pressure as it were to engage with certain issues or not engage with certain issues at some point Chris mentioned quietism as a passive form of not engaging with historical reckoning. Not that you don't care you care but you don't say anything. So there's a very interesting conversation going on here I suppose in relation to eugenics. And one of the question and comment alludes to that whether politics or political pressure may influence a decision certain institutions for example the museum may take regarding certain issues and obviously the National Institute of Health. I can assume that this is not something you can answer easily and you feel that baby is not for you to answer this question. But for the sake of honesty and transparency I raise it because it's being asked in this panel also because it connects to something that Chris mentioned at the beginning of this symposium in his comments about the ultimate need to forcefully engage publicly with certain issues irrespective of the political climate I suppose. I can I can make a comment. I don't I don't want to answer that question I guess completely directly but I'll just say in terms of the initiatives that we've taken at our Institute over the past year. I mean we I mean our director Eric Dr Green acknowledged you know in his opening statements that you know our Institute has you know problematic ties to figures and that aren't maybe necessarily directly related to eugenics but are pretty close you know there's problematic history there and I think this year we've really taken we've we've we've really wanted to have an you know an active conversation about that and to start to reckon with it because it's something that we haven't really reckon with and it feels important and I mean it just speaks to us having this event you know that that we want to take this seriously and we look to continue you know engaging with this in the in the future so that's not a direct answer but I'll just say that. That's that's absolutely absolutely fine and of course we know that you know certain white supremacists embrace eugenic ideas there's a big debate about revivalism within that particular segment and there is a very important discussion about whiteness here and white fragility and all those sorts of things that at some point had time permitted would have been an important addition to this but it's something that at least we are clearly aware of and we want to highlight and regrettably a time is not on our side now before we close this I want to I want to raise one final point and if you have a second to react to this all of you will be really nice comes from. One of our contributors to the conversation and he raises interesting point about a particular tension that exists between sharing information and you know you are in the. In that line of work as it were you share information with people who come to you and how do you actually then at the same time construct knowledge about that particular information and how to what do you do with that particular knowledge. There is a tension maybe there or there is a difficulty there I don't know how you feel about that to you understand what the question is, is it clear that's the way I can see it here but. Not sure I completely grasp it the way I'm understanding it is there's like a certain dissemination of historical knowledge and then there's also the formation of new approaches is that what this person is getting at. Yeah I hope so I hope so I can see only the second part of his questions so I can't see the first part so he speaks of a tension that exists between this two and I think I understood correctly this what he's referring to yeah. So I can say for our part the kind of part of the museum that's represented here is the part that works most with students and faculty in more of a classroom capacity that's what Catherine and myself do from the perspective of campus outreach and it's what. Mark does from the perspective of the various digital assets that we have, but the museum also has an entire apparatus both within the Mandel Center for advanced Holocaust studies as well as throughout the institution that supports scholars who come to the very extensive archives that we have to do exactly that to produce new knowledge out of the materials that that we have on site. And that one has access to in a number of different ways. And then we also host many different types of lectures and panels and other types of programs that that are also meant to do that so I'm not totally sure I actually see attention between the two I think they complement each other in different ways. And it depends who you're talking to and what you're looking at and I would even say. Many, many is the time in faculty seminars and really many is the time in the production of our digital resources which we never do in a vacuum we're always talking to outside faculty with whom we work where that's a very symbiotic relationship right like we will learn things in the production. In the conversation that happens in the room of the seminar we will learn things in the production of a collection for experiencing history so to me those things go can actually go hand in hand quite nicely I don't know if my colleagues Catherine or Mark want to pick up on it and any part of that. Yeah, I was able actually to find the first part of the of the comment layer so and I don't want to run over it's it's important I suppose to read it so if Mark or Catherine you want to add something please go ahead I don't want to cut you short but then afterwards I will read what Milton Reynolds has to say in connection to that point. No, I think we have summarized things nicely for us. Catherine, go ahead. Okay, hold on a second because it's now more questions are coming in and right. So he says the following the decoupling of racialization from the national project seems to prevent people from making the important connection between eugenic ideology and its continuity. This seems especially true in the way Americans have been socialized to think of racism as an individually transactive phenomenon, rather than being driven through ideology and policy. This is not to dismiss individual responsibility, but to address the challenges of this work. So I think the positivity that comes from the last sentence is that the challenges of this work are important and I think this is the. It's a nice way I think to end this panel and your wonderful contributions to accept that there are challenges ahead, and there are probably many challenges ahead, but we are ready to face them. Okay, well, with that in mind, Chris, I think we should say thank you to this wonderful presentations and to wonderful colleagues and to express my appreciation for this conversation. And we can now move to a broader discussion where I invite all panelists to join in please. Thank you, Marius. There are a number of points that I could bring up to start to begin the discussion. I think, and because you've done such a wonderful job with this panel, I'm just going to ask Alex, maybe you wanted to talk a little bit more about sort of the connections between race, racism and eugenics. And your perspective on these issues and we may we can start there. I know that was an issue that you wanted to raise. Well thank you I wasn't sure when to come in and turn on my video and unmute and all of that so thank you for inviting me back into this final discussion and I would say that. There's a lot to unpack there as part of our ongoing collective work and I think that was part of Milton's point that doing this work collectively is really is essential to the anti eugenics project. And I would go back to some of the points that have been made about the centrality of disability and constructions of disability and ableism to really understanding the various the multifaceted ways in which racism and othering happens in the context of eugenics. So I don't know if I completely buy the argument that someone can be a eugenicist and not a racist. I think there are multiple axes spinning at all times and it's basically one step away it's like three points of separation. In terms of any times hierarchies are being constructed the kind of modern world in which we live or the post post modern world is so saturated in racial forms of othering and hierarchy that I think it's virtually impossible to pull a kind of, you know, like unadulterated kind of eugenicist out of that so that's one comment. The second comment relates to the point that Marius was making about looking beyond we've talked to it seems like this this has been fantastic I've learned so much. We focused a lot however on kind of the US and German experiences with maybe a few other examples with the formative kind of period of Galton and so on. However, there's a whole big world of other eugenic experiences out there, and we can think of you know Argentina or Brazil or also Mexico. Mexico is a really interesting case because in Mexico, they took up eugenics wholeheartedly after the Mexican Revolution, but spun it in a way that was pushing back against US imperialism to embrace this idea of the cosmic mestizo race. So it certainly was a kind of racialization. It wasn't banked on white purity in fact it was trying to turn that on its head almost in a kind of reverse equation. So I think more pondering that pondering that both in terms of what happened in other countries and the role of for example Jewish eugenicists or African American eugenics in the US is something we can continue to do to see some of the insidious ways in which continuities can play out to this day. So I'll stop there because I'm sure others have interesting things to add. Well what I wanted to say and Marius of course can and jump in is that one of the areas the geographic areas that I think hoses a number of these questions and a number of these continuities quite well is so called Eastern Europe. Much of the eugenics movements in the Czechoslovakian and also Croatian eugenics movements depend upon notions of anti-blackness that actually are directly from Davenport. And that is and that many of the ways in which the Czech eugenics movement functions is in deep con with for example František Čada is he is very influenced in many ways by G. Stanley Hall in terms of how he views the ideal or the ideal organic Czech society. And so we haven't really talked about sort of the legacies of imperialism of racism of hierarchicalization of the construction of whiteness and of blackness in in these in these spaces in which there are very clear connections between kind of the American eugenics movement and other eugenics movements in ways that I think have that have deeply important relevancies for for historically marginalized communities in these geographies today and Marius, this is also something you can you can comment on. But I just wanted to say that quickly that that is also a deep interest of mine and a deep concern of mine. Yeah, I think that's an important point and thank you Alex for highlighting it again. We tend to look at this more or less as ideal ties and of course we believe that the Anglo-American and German models of eugenics were the only ones. And I'm happy you mentioned Mexico or Brazil or Argentina or Chile where of course the French model of eugenics was very popular. And French science in general exerted extraordinary impact and French medicine and French public health in these countries as much as it did of course in France I mean we haven't mentioned France. And the other model of course is the Italian connection to use the pan here. The Italian fascism hugely important and the whole discussion about natalism and demography. People like Gerardo Gini were absolutely hugely influential or endocrinologists like Nicola Pende who had an extraordinary career in Central and Latin America and of course as well as in Italy and Eastern Europe. So these are people who contributed significantly to debates about biotype, constitutional medicine, endocrinology and how that's filtered into eugenics offering very different models. Roth highlighted some of these issues in his paper on eugenics and homosexuality and of course endocrinology contributed significantly to this debate. And they come from areas which were not mentioned here geographically speaking because you know we didn't have time but it is important at least here at the end to highlight these differences and different traditions and contributors which I suppose notable. Okay so I also think another question to to think about a bit more and I think this is part of I was going to talk about this in my sort of the unanswered questions that that have come out of this symposium in which we have a great deal more study to do on many of these topics is really thinking about as Alex said kind of how and as Milton is also pointing out sort of how I think really disability is something which fabrics the entirety of the notions of ability fabrics the entirety of eugenics. And Sandra Gilman and others have talked about how disability difference as pathology have are really at the root of many of our prejudices and many of our stigmas. So I think this is something where really making ensuring that that all of these discussions about eugenics and scientific racism depend upon a notion in which we understand that any that normalization and this typification of this very narrow sense of of white kind of whiteness aesthetics or this anguish is kind of fetishized anguish axonism is at the root of many many eugenics movements and that includes a lot of discussion so we focus on on I think and Marius is good to pick this up as well and as well as our panelists that there is a way in which we should also talk about eugenics and eugenics movements not simply as as negative eugenics but as positive eugenics and also in a much more broader social framework such as social ostracization and social stigma. There was I there's a scholar who actually just gave a talk on on you on basically on prejudice on racism maybe you know this this was on your Twitter Marius on on sort of stigma site and smell and how this is how we we have many of these stigmas sort of unconsciously operating with under with historically marginalized communities and that this this is allows eugenics and allows sort of exclusionary potentials to function in the in the present with very little, you know, basically as as individual policy but as group policy but also as kind of state apparatus. I think that's something that there is a danger to have obviously the American focus is important because we are located right outside Bethesda Maryland and that's I think it's also important because the eugenics movement in the United States is it is a clear example or for others but I think making sure that practices periods periodization. Forms of eugenics are all equally represented and that that we understand in any ways the research on this has to be done so that's I think my other question is is what more do we need to understand in order to to make sure that we are representative of the specificities of eugenics and all of its practices and not tied to geography what barriers remain to that research. To pick up also on some questions so where are the archives, how are they situated what can historians do, what can scientists do to help historians what can archivists do public historians in order to get this, you know, get this malicious fabric kind of more well known. Sorry for the long question so anyone would like to jump in. No, that's very good that before anyone jumps in I just want now that you put it in such a way Chris, which I appreciate I just realized, we also need to push this conversation because you mentioned Choslovakia, for example, but obviously we talk about eugenics after 1950s, but we haven't mentioned a big chunk of the world which was under communism. And how eugenics developed in the Soviet Union, from the 1920s onwards, how it develops in Eastern Europe in the, you know, 50s and 60s and 70s, and all discussion about various marginalized communities and stigmatization in Eastern Europe of certain communities, particularly the Roma and how eugenics survives and is recreated by say socialism, and how it fuses and it moves into public health programs and educational programs, almost a creation of educational programs under communism which, of course, people will never go that direction, or very few historians will go that direction so there is, there is need for that. It's incredibly important topics, I suppose, to bring it indeed. Now in connection to that, I suppose we need to reach a point when we need to decolonize historical scholarship on eugenics, you know, to move away from this idealization of certain case studies and to assume that those master narratives have the power that we historians attributed to it and certainly it was attributed to them 30 years ago. I mean, some of us remember how the scholarship on eugenics looked 30 years ago, and you cannot imagine how you'll be very surprised if you look at how many books were in eugenics in the 1990s, and how many books were in a comparative global eugenics in the 1990s, even more important. You could really count them on, you know, the three books out there. It was absolutely serious historical research imperatives. So we moved a long way, of course, now, and we have the historical cases, we have the archives, and now it's time, I think, we move the conversation on another level which is about, of course, the, what we do with that information, what we do with that historical archives, what we do reposition the people in this story. We need to bring the people back in. We need to bring those communities back in. We need to empower those communities that were targeted and allow that dialogue with them to happen. Now, I said I would only jump in. So, Ross, I turn to you now, because I see your hand raised up there. Thank you. Just a few, I guess, disconnected thoughts that resonated as you were posting a question, Chris, which has to do with different cultures of science and eugenics. I've come across, it seems to be a general recognition for many of the panelists that have spoken on both days. There seems to be an acceptance or an awareness that eugenics is still with us today in different forms. Now, I'm sure we can all think of examples that are very, very familiar and that resonates with historical examples and expressions of eugenics. But there are also some that modern genomics and modern science that are new, and they won't necessarily look familiar, particularly with the complexities of science. I mean, I involved myself with today's publications. There's been one this week called Sexual Orientation Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Neuro Transmitters Involved. Now, I look at that title and I get, no, I understand, I can see there's something going on there, there's going to be a great interest. And I find resonances with eugenics. It's taken me 15 years and a PhD to get to that point. And in terms, especially in the night of the discussions in the last panel about making very complex subjects relevant and that speak to different audiences that have not necessarily got 15 years and a PhD's worth of experience. So, I guess, just to throw this out, I don't have an answer to this. It's a problem that I've come across in terms of recognizing what's going on today, just in quite a niche field. But in terms of making projects and endeavors of the kind that we've been discussing, particularly in the last panel, and communicating histories of eugenics in a way that is relevant, how can we do that when there is this very, very large body of scientific experience that is actually really incredibly inaccessible and it's just unintelligible to most people. I'm only going to throw that out there. Like I said, I don't have an answer to that. It's something that I've worked on very hard in my own little corner of historiography. I still don't feel that in other areas, I would recognize expressions of eugenics that are playing out today. Yeah, I think in 2021 eugenics may wear different dress, but it is not new. And I think that's something that is clearly the case here, right? It's a very different type of eugenic thinking, behavior and practice, I suppose, to some extent. We discussed yesterday certain articles that were published in prestigious scientific journals, which tried to rehabilitate, to some extent the words raised in other ways or in other forms, the whole discussion about eugenics. And I'm not talking here about all debate on liberal eugenics and neo eugenics and this human enhancement and the conversation, which we haven't even engaged with here. But like you pointed out, Ross, I mean, you recognize immediately certain patterns or tropes of eugenics thinking because you know the history of that particular line of reasoning and how it intersects, how it intervenes in the life of individual, how it try to blurs the boundaries between private and public and be violent, basically. It is a violent way of interfering with your life. And I suppose knowledge of the history of that and knowledge of the history of eugenics would help identify, would help you identify better, I suppose, those moments. All of us go through that and regrettably, I suppose, and this is the reasons why today and yesterday we were so, I suppose, in febrile and energizing conversation is that we hear those tropes or those eugenic flickering constantly now. Whether it is in relation to COVID or before it was in relation to certain political activities of various people. Or it is on a daily conversation on the street, you surprise yourself listening to a conversation on the street and you hear people talking in a way that is so consonant or commensurate with the patterns of eugenics thinking you thought belong to the history books. So, Marius, unfortunately, I have to close this discussion because we actually have to close the conference, the symposium, and I just want to make sure that our colleagues from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, are there any kind of 15 or 20 second contributions that you can make to this discussion before I officially close out the conference with some themes and a brief thank you. I think all that I would say is that this has been a really rich conversation. I think this shows how much we have to learn how much we have to learn from each other and how many different types of resources and different types of conversations are out there to be had. So I thank you for the invitation and for bringing us into this conversation this afternoon. Thank you. Thank you panelists. Thank you, Marius. I'm simply going to with three minutes, make a few remarks and then I will turn it over to Marius for some final few remarks of his and then we will officially end this fantastic and deeply moving event. So, I think we've talked about some of these things but I want to make sure that there is indeed a sort of some summation of many of the things that we have tried to bring together in this meeting. I think there's a clear narrative about state power and its limits and eugenics. I think there's a clear narrative as both as the community in the context of eugenics as both coercive and defensive, capable of resisting eugenics. I think there's a clear discussion, particularly in Johanna's work and Natalie's work on agency and resistance in the context of eugenics sterilization. We all always need to make sure that whenever we talk about eugenics, whenever we talk about eugenics methods, we're talking about individuals whose social futures are profoundly changed, or whose lives, whose autonomies are ended in many ways. I think clearly there is a discussion about ableism and about unreal aspects of humanity that eugenics seizes upon with its easy solutions to social problems. Ideas of fitness and ability and function that need to be further examined. The question of pseudoscience and eugenics is pervasive in all of our discussions. The importance of confronting eugenics and the role of history and historical scholarship is another theme. Ideologies of race, nation and social class and how they function in the context of eugenics practices and eugenics ideas. Obviously the importance for two last things of confronting eugenics and of rehumanization as eugenics is inherently dehumanizing. I think also as we pointed out with the discussion with Rob and Marius that confronting past history of eugenics or of scientific racism is in a dialectic, a dynamic with building trust in science. If you are a scientific institution, you build trust through confronting their history in an honest, transparent way that one is closely and intimately connected to the other. Again, in terms of unanswered questions, other perspectives than in the US perspectives are really essential. There's a great deal to be gained from an American focus. There's also limitations. There's other eugenic practices such as stigmatization and social ostracism. Eugenics is pseudoscientific in what context, is it scientific in what context during what period, whom is speaking and writing is very important here. Emphasizing disability as a fundamental narrative is another unanswered question. There's a deep concern over contemporary eugenics, the use of emerging technologies for the purposes of eugenics, furthering eugenics ideas or practices, contemporary uses of this is a deep concern. I also think there's a real concern too about intelligence testing, genetic studies of social behavior, of using genetics in order to gain some insight into complex social life into human specificity and individuality is something which has really come back into the contemporary conversation of many of these issues. And I think this is one of many things that we will hopefully try to address in future meetings and future forums. We certainly are going to have a follow up question and answer discussion forum with our panelists as well as some other guests. We know that I think there was 150 questions something like that, we know we have not answered all of your questions, you know this is a complex discussion, which is rich in meaning and significance and that we were not able to get through all of it today. So we will be having follow ups of one of which is a is a discussion forum hopefully sometime in January. From my perspective, I'd like to thank our audience, our panelists are moderators, the NHGRI and especially the communications branch here, including Sarah Bates, Brittany Kish are fantastic behind the scenes. I would like to thank all the people, Joe Samani and Alvaro Encinas, and with that I will, and also, Marius as co-convener. I thank you and I turn it over to you for any final thoughts that you have, although we're a little bit out of time. Now I think you've done a brilliant job, not only putting it all together Chris but also throughout the symposium. I'm very grateful to you and to NHGRI and to your colleagues. It's been a momentous occasion and I really felt that something was building and that we are moving forward in ways previously unthinkable. So that's remarkable and just a day before our symposium started, President Gail Jarvik, President of the American Society of Human Genetics issued a very important statement on December the 1st. And if I'm not mistaken, I think Gail was with us yesterday and she says that as scientists we must continue to be visible in our rejection of eugenics and racism and we must be honest in addressing human genetics past. So this statement coming from the American Society of Human Genetics and this symposium I think prove amongst many other things that transformative change is possible. Scholarly debate is important but so too is action and the time to act is now. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Have a good evening everyone and a good weekend. Thank you. Goodbye everyone. Goodbye.