 I'm honored to introduce Vince Bonham to moderate our next Q&A session. Mr. Bonham is Acting Deputy Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute and a member of the senior leadership team for the Institute. He provides leadership for the Institute's health equity and workforce diversity programs and works in partnership across the NIH to promote the mission of the Institute. Mr. Bonham, over to you. Great. Thank you, Chris. First, thank you for such great talks this afternoon. And I want to start with the audience. I ask you to please submit your questions in the Q&A and upvote questions that you would like the panelists to answer today. So I want to just start with a question for all of the panelists. And my question is this, in each of your talks, you examine sexuality or disability or race or reproductive coercion and historical eugenics. Can you discuss the connections to your historical research, to the principles of eugenics you see continuing today? I'll start off. Thank you so much, Vince, for that question. And I'm so thrilled and honored to be on this panel with Reina and Ross, and nice to meet you virtually. I'll say make two points that I think we can continue to talk about. The first is that to continue to reinforce that the categories of disability and that basically eugenics and ableism are intimately connected. And that is a history that goes back, reaches back before the development of the institutionalized eugenics movement. There's been some really interesting historical work on disability in the context of slavery and post reconstruction that highlights the connections between, for example, race, conceptions of freedom and disability. So I think that continuing to think about eugenics as a reflection of and as a window onto understanding disability history and to not lose that very long thread. Paul Rembes pointed that out this morning in his talk as well. So I would say that's one aspect that all of our talks touch on, which is about who has a fit body, who is worthy of being able of sexuality or reproduction. And the second is just the whole science of measurement. This is all about measuring people for the purposes of calculating worth and often making predictions about their future worth. So I think that all of our, from my perspective, our three talks, they look at different aspects of measurement and they're really insidious and often sinister ways in which measurement and classification work to create hierarchies of humans and to ultimately dehumanize some groups over others. So those are two themes that I see connecting the papers. Thank you. Professor Brooks? Thank you, Ben. And yes, I share Alex's pleasure to be here on this panel with such distinguished people. There was another answer to your question about the connections between the past and the present. I think it's contained in Marna's wonderful paper. I was very impressed how you kind of broke the golden barrier and went back even further into the 19th century just to show as very clearly as you did the continuities between, you can go right back, 18th century, 19th century prejudices and the way Victorians spoke about and considered human differences and how this was absorbed into eugenic and genetic discourse through the early 20th century. And in many ways, there's actually a very interesting question. I think it was Highland Nature has asked the question about the connection between pre-existing prejudices and social deviance and how Mendelian genetic and eugenic discourse perpetuated ideas, prejudices and practices against minorities and social deviance. And that continuity has not gone away. It's very striking to me looking at today's studies, genetic and broader studies of what gets called queer science or the psychobiology of sex orientation. These studies contain a very significant historical element and I think this is true of most scientific studies, if not all. And of course this manifests in their references. And again, rather I think brought out this time, I think you used the term paper trail. And these scientific studies contain very definite paper trails, historical links and often their arguments are made either to reject or to build upon stuff that's gone on in the past. And I think that that is often lost and it's very interesting as a story. One of the things we do seriously is to follow through these paper trails. And so when I look at something like the, I mean, it's been mentioned a couple of times today, there's some G-Wan studied in 2019 that appeared in science. Huge, huge, I think it was almost half a million people were sampled. They're long list of references and when you follow them through, I can find very, very clear paper trails to the kind of studies that I discussed in my paper from the 1950s. And so these scientific studies, although presented as pure science, very rhetoric, they're often at the top of a very fragile historical paper tiger. And I think that recognition of the historical legacies that today's scientists and today's genomics build upon, I think it just needs much better recognition that actually the studies that we read today are built upon and are layered upon deep historical, often very problematic trajectories. So I'd like to also just say how delighted I am to be a part of this symposium and to share space with them, very distinguished callers. I'll try to be very brief with my comments, but I think in terms of connections between past and present, something that kind of has stuck with me in doing this project is to think about ways in which people might think they're offering like compliments, particularly on the idea of athleticism as being like an inborn trait for some kinds of racial groups and realize that they're not kind of, they're dabbling actually in this very negative, essentialist kind of language. So, you know, I think there are probably many who might think of W. Montecoucob, I know that he actually worked to try and dispel these myths that, you know, Jesse Owens is athletic because he's a black person and they must have these genes that make them this way. You'd be surprised that you will still actually hear people say that about like sort of track and field sprinters from Jamaica, from other places, people of African descent saying, oh, well, they're just built for that and that's their nature and that's sort of their genes and that's really troubling actually. And so for me, I think that I'm interested in looking at this kind of quite early history, but I know that there are, you know, it's so nice to see this kind of a forum where we can sort of bring together and understand the roots of some of the language and assumptions that people make even if they think they're being positive, but they're not. They're actually buying into and being complicit into a very harmful, I would argue, discourse that has been sort of either objectifying or in some pieces, reducing people down to their ability. So in this case, it's sort of lauding a racial group for having some kind of ability, but then also you can see the flip side of this of making comments about people who maybe have different abilities. And so this is something that we need to see more of. And I was going to say there's probably a lot of young scholars. You know, there's lots of scholars that are actually doing this really great work of expanding what eugenics means and actually tapping into African-American scholars work sort of into saying, how do they push back against these very negative views? So yeah, I think these are the kinds of conversations we need to be having. And I'm glad to just be a part of it. Thank you. Alex, I want to ask a question going conducting. As you look across the different states and the issue of the role of race and racism and sterilization, I'm interested more about some of the differences that you found in some of the data that you have from California and North Carolina and the other states. Yeah, thank you for that question. So I think first off, we should start by looking at the kind of broad patterns that we see across the 20th century when it comes to looking at the passage and implementation of eugenic sterilization laws. So many of those participating in today's conference may know that the first eugenic sterilization law in the world was passed in Indiana in 1907. And who did it target? It targeted men overwhelmingly, many men who were identified as being criminalistic and or sexually deviant. There was a great anxiety about cases of sodomy among basically poor rural men, the majority of whom were white. And one of the reasons that sterilization started off being focused on men was because vasectomy is a simpler procedure and certainly was the simpler of the two procedures at the time. So if we start at that point, though, and we look and we track across time, let me move this because now, of course, the sun is right in my eyes. If we track across time across the 20th century, what we see is that more and first of all, different institutions get pulled into sterilization programs. So if it starts in reformatories and prisons, it soon soon moves into mental institutions, asylums and hospitals, psychiatric hospitals for lack of a better term. As that happens, more women begin to be sterilized, more immigrants begin to be sterilized and groups that today would probably be classified as white, but at the time we're seen by eugenicists as undesirable Mediterranean and alpines with Nordics and Tutans being at the utmost kind of apex of racial superiority. So over time, more women are sterilized and increasingly more immigrants and people of color are sterilized. And we can see that playing out over time and also state by state as different states pass their sterilization laws. So, for example, looking at California, the laws passed in 1909. We see that over time, increasingly, individuals with Spanish surname Latinx, as well as our research is showing Asian, Asian and Asian-American, as well as, you know, including Filipinos are sterilized at higher rates. So we see that across time. And, you know, I think the way in which that plays out is very much connected to the demographics and the changing demographics, state to state. I did notice that Robert Resta made a very good comment in the Q&A or the chat about the fact that, you know, there is a very twisted irony at play when it comes to the history of eugenic sterilization, which is that, you know, most people know about Kerry Buck's case. Kerry Buck was sterilized because she was had the privilege of going to a state institution that blacks in the state Virginia were not allowed to go to because things were so segregated with medical institutions. So I cannot think of a more perverse irony than that, which Kiara Bridges, a wonderful scholar of kind of reproduction and law has written about. So that affected actually sterilization patterns in southern states in particular over time. In addition, if, you know, sterilization starts off being focused really explicitly on eugenic characteristics around heredity and who is fit to reproduce by the forties and fifties. It's still carrying that along, but it's also moving more towards focus on who is fit to parent, who is fit to actually have a family. And as that happens, as that kind of shift takes place, that is where we see more and more sterilizations targeted people of color, particularly women of color, such that by the time we get to the 60s, 70s and 80s, and there's a second wave of sterilizations not under eugenic state programs, but happening in county hospitals and certainly part of this broader history. Overwhelmingly, it's women of color that are being targeted. So, you know, I think I tend to see the really big picture here. There are variations, you know, certainly from state to state driven by when the laws are passed, how the laws are implemented, who are in who's in the institutions and what the demographics and the changing demographics are, such that if you start off in 1907 and in Indiana and end up, you know, in the 1980s in North Carolina, there's going to be very different groups that are going to be affected by sterilization programs. I hope that answered the question and put it in context. Thank you. And one last question for the panelists before I go to the Q&A. And this is a question that's kind of come up all day about the connection between historical eugenics and today. And so my question is this. What is your view on how eugenics today is often broadly defined? And even in the chat today, people have talked about polygenetic embryo selection, gene editing, various ways that activities and things that are happening today in science are connected to eugenics. And how does a broad definition of eugenics in the discourse of today change our understanding of the scientific and social aspects of the eugenic movement and the eugenic interventions? You know, who would like to start? I could just contribute something that, you know, looking at the queer, queer aspects of eugenics, I've tried to highlight some of the great research that's been done. But if you look at the dates of that, it's quite recent because previously to a considerable extent, queer aspects of the history of eugenics, people didn't even consider it. That it was something that eugenics was something that so that queer people were affected by to the extent that it was. I'm not saying that when earlier earlier studies and earlier recognition, particularly with regard to the situation in Germany, but the ubiquity with which people being involved, either as eugenicists or as subjects of eugenic ideas and practices, that's I think has developed from recent developments in genomics, ideas about gay genes, gay brains that has produced a much broader and a widening understanding of. The especially the mercurial nature of eugenics, how that how eugenics has spread into so many different thought systems and practices, particularly through the 20th century. So it's it's still relatively new, but there is there is this very important dynamic between what is happening in what I've been calling queer science, what Simon LeVay calls queer science and the production of new kinds of histories and new kinds of awareness of how certainly queer people, lots, lots of other kinds of people have been affected by eugenics. And I think this goes back to I think Marius was talking earlier this morning about eugenics not being exceptional, that it permeated so many, if not ubiquitously the historical trajectory of the 20th century. So yes, I think that that that relationship between the now and the historical is so intimate and so inextricably connected, which is why events like this, where we're drawing it out much more publicly and and and hopefully going forward in a way that will expand, you know, awareness and the conversation between different kinds of people, even more. Right, Dr. Hockardt. Yeah, I mean, I guess what I could possibly speak to is at least for me, perhaps maybe less gene editing, but more of the interest of sort of trying to quantify one's identity through like very popular like DNA tests. Right. So there's like any three in me or there are these commercials where people say I just found out I'm this percent Scottish or this percent, you know, in search region or ethnicity or race. And so that it's it kind of strikes me every time I hear or see these kinds of commercials, because it makes me think about the idea of OK, well, well, first of all, what does that mean to quantify that part of you? Like, how does that maybe change your identity? How are people using that? And then what are the slippages and dangers of doing that? Because again, you're kind of collapsing and reifying this idea that that is a thing like, you know, as if, oh, well, I'm part black. So that means that what does that mean? How do you use that? And for thinking about particularly, you know, there's this new movie out passing and there's been a whole discussion about, you know, people's abilities or what they look like and how people so collapse that and say, oh, I have a great, great, great, great ancestor who was of this race, I'm this percent black. And so people might joke and say, oh, well, that means I have this affinity, but I think there's something dangerous about that. I think that there are ways that we can often think about percentigizing, I guess, trying to quantify identity in ways that can be extremely harmful for marginalized groups and those who kind of have who are read their races, maybe read in a way that's more legible and in more harmful ways. So I think that what I find to be fascinating about doing this in the past and thinking about how people see their identities is to say, you know, we should be cautious of the mischief and fluidity of race and categories. I think we have to respect the boundaries that people should want to embrace their identity, you know, whatever, right, racial identity. They have in sort of cultural social ways to collapse that down to biology or to say, well, that means I'm more predisposed to have this because I'm this race, right? I think a lot of times people might say something like sickle cell anemia is a black disease, which always kind of gives me the pause back and say we should not do that because it's collapsing. Again, this idea that the racial category is sort of like the explanation for the disease when we're really thinking about something that's a heritable molecular disorder or that condition that is, you know, people can trace that through different sort of populations over time that has evolved rather than collapsing it into race. So part of why I do this work as a historian is to think about the origins and roots of sort of how it became assumed or how we use the kind of language or vocabulary of percentatizing and quantifying and seeing that being tethered to this social construction of race and how that can still be used in sort of biology and clinical settings and research settings. Thank you, Professor Starn. Well, I really appreciated those answers. I don't know if I have really that much, you know, more to add. Maybe we can move on to the questions given we have limited time and so many questions. I know. So let's jump right in and we'll try to do these in fairly short period of time. So for the first questions for you, Dr. Brooks, can you comment on the parent conflict between homosexual rights activists embracing a genetic or biologic basis to homosexuality to argue homophobic claims of homosexuality is a lifestyle that is chosen, therefore can be unchosen though conversion interventions and instead an innate to the individual or second, the damage and injury caused by embracing a genetic or biologic basis for homosexuality. Yeah, out of the frying pan into the fire, or I think an even better way that was encapsulated. I mentioned Garland's study in 1990s and in the title, he uses the phrase of double edged sword of genetic determinism. And I think that really hits upon something that's been going on for 30 years. I mean, yes, yes, there's a longer discourse, but the great gay genes debacle of the early 1990s really, really sharpened both sides of this double edged sword of genetic determinism. I said in my paper that I grew up gay in the midst of this. And I remember my as a teenager, knowing very, very little about the studies at school, actually using genetic arguments for people who were saying that people were bad, people were ill, people were this, people were that. Well, coming back with that quick retort, well, actually, there's studies that say this genetic, it's it's something you can reach for. It's it's something that's it's it's a defense. Some it's it's a very alluring thought. Actually, there's nothing I can do, nothing you can do, nothing. Society. But as I say, it's out of the frying pan into the fire. Because, yes, it's naive to think that's that that argument. Which was perpetuated in such an intense way through the 1990s. But it also produced new discourses about prenatal interventions and the preventions of where people being born. That's the examples I gave it in my paper. I don't think there is any resolution to that at all, except through broader conversations like we're having at the moment and just greater awareness of the difference as Chris said in his introduction to the event today. You know, difference in perceived as pathology. That's that's the that's the crux of the only by dissolving that through educational programs and and events such as this. Only that will resolve and unsharpen this. Double edged sword, very, very sharp on both edges. Thank you. So I'm going to go, we're going to try to do two more questions and then give each of you a last minute of reflections. So the next question is for you, Dr. Hogarth, it is related to some basic use of terms and medical genetics. The the individual says, working in medical genetics, there are specific conditions in which woolly hair and quotes is described as one of the salient clinical physical features. There are an abundance of dysmorphisms with roots and eugenics. What are the your thoughts on the continued usage of these terms in medicine and given their roots? How can we move away from this? OK, wow, so this is a great question. I am not in medical genetics, but I'm kind of puzzled and very curious to understand the context in which like woolly hair is descriptor for individual like person or is kind of disorder or condition. But the reason why I want to know more about that is because from my perspective as a historian, you know, I do a lot of work in the 18th century and the phrase woolly hair or wool or fleece is almost always then attended with black people as a description. Some have even gone as far as saying it's not so much hair as it is a wool or a fleece, and that is a bit of a I mean, that's clearly a problem. It is a clear kind of metaphor and descriptor that is meant to make a distinction of like here's the standard of what hair should be. And then here is what this group, this type of person has, and it is not that standard. And so it is almost always certainly negative and pejorative. So I'd be quite curious to understand the specific context. Is this a matter of sort of a term that has just kind of been handed down and that people haven't really bothered to think about the origins of how that works? Because I know that those terms do certainly exist in sort of medical language and vocabularies. But I wonder then, is there something very specific about the disorder or at play, right at the focus of this, where that is the right descriptor? Because as far as I can tell, in terms of describing human features, woolly hair is it's it's it's it's harmful. Let's let's say that. OK, thank you. And Professor Stern, the next questions for you. And I just bounced away from me. So there were reports last year about sterilization of migrants being held attempting to cross the US border. How do you think of those recent events in light of the history of forced sterilization? I think that we should connect those recent incidents to the long history of eugenics, particularly with respect to state reproductive control and coercion. Unfortunately, we still live in a world where this type of reproductive coercion and, you know, much larger attempts at population control are at play. In that instance, I mean, one of the one of the takeaways from studying closely, particularly institutions in California in its history of eugenics is that there are several factors that generally are present when people are subjected to unwanted sterilizations. First, there's a vulnerable population, which is likely to be dehumanized, that doesn't necessarily have civil rights or visa immigration rights. They often are separated out, you know, behind the walls of institutions where there is very little oversight or a lack of interest in oversight. And then increasingly over the past 30 years, what we've seen in the US is that where unwanted sterilizations have occurred, such as in California women's prisons and in the detention facility in Georgia, that there were contracted physicians who did this work, you know, often not the most scrupulous of physicians who did this work to make a buck. And then the reason we found out about it was because there were courageous whistleblowers who told their stories and brought them to often kind of watchdog news organizations. So I think it's important for us to think about both the similarities and some of the distinctions all within the context of understanding that, you know, these are policies and practices that have sought to deprive certain groups of reproductive futures in smaller and larger numbers. Well, thank you. We've come to the end of our time. We could have gone on for another half an hour, but I just want to again thank you each for your talks and for the conversation this afternoon. Thank you so much. Thank you, Alex. So first of all, I'd like to thank our panelists, our moderators and our audience, as well as Marius's co-convener of this symposium for these brilliant discussions today in these very important, weighty and meaningful conversations that we've been having. The purpose of this symposium has been to have meaningful discussions about these various serious and important topics. And I think one of the major lessons, themes of this symposium has been that it's imperative that past history promotes present reflection and that present reflection in turn will promote better histories. And I think in particular with discussions of the phenomenon of eugenics, the phenomenon's ideas and practices of scientific racism, which is so various and detailed by country, by time period, by instance and by specific and by specifics that we consistently use our case studies, our knowledge, our research, our interventions in the archive, our more sophisticated tools and methods to promote better general reflection, better definitions without losing that specificity. And I think that's one of the major questions, too, is how to define eugenics, how to define also many of its ideas and ideologies, how to describe better its practices and that we will continue to be informed, not only in this conference, but in of all of the all of the brilliant work that is done by our panelists and by many, many others and by many in the audience of because eugenics, the discussions of the history of eugenics of its ideas and practices must be a discussion, it must be a dialogue about present day forms and iterations, it must be a continual practice that we continually improve upon in order to better understand the past in order to better to better acknowledge the present. So as sort of more formulaically tomorrow, we will have continue in our discussions of the ideologies and practices of eugenics and scientific racism. We will also continue our discussions of the practice sterilization and other practices that occur with eugenics. We will, but as importantly, we will also after really going through a number of other brilliant research presentations, particularly in the morning and early afternoon, we will give our audiences a number of of discussions of museum exhibits as well as educational materials that they themselves, that you as our audience can you can learn more about these very complex topics you can read and you can understand at a deeper level. And this I think will promote reflection. We are very impressed with your questions. This gives us a great deal of information for further events. And we look forward even beyond this conference to future events, which will keep in mind many of the discussions that have been going on throughout today. So I just wanted also to turn it over to Marius for any concluding thoughts over to you, Marius. OK, thank you very much. I share with you and with the other moderators the opinion that this was an extraordinary, really rich day and all the papers presented in the afternoon and in the morning were very rich, provocative, but at the same time, sensitive and attentive to historical detail and nuances. And that that squares very well. We what we just said, Chris, about the dialogue, it has to be a dialogue. I would like to highlight three points here, what I picked from from today's conversation. The first one is about if we can call definitions and founding fathers. We mentioned Francis Galton, Charles Davenport, Arthur Plutz, basically the three main figures in British, American and German eugenics. So that's that's that's important. We did try to offer some indication of of historicity in this way. But what we also indicated, I suppose, that there was no single definition of eugenics. It is true, however, the eugenics, I mentioned, they evolved the term as if it were recognizable to all of them. And if the term had an identity of its own, distinct from related concepts, they use at the same time. Race, betterment was one term they used. Racial hygiene was another term they used. Hygiene of the nation and so on. So I think we could say safely eugenics meant many things to many people. Sometimes it was clearly defined. Often it was left and clear on purpose. So but what brings it all together, I suppose, is what transpired from today's conversation is that all eugenics claim to act in the name of future generations by ensuring the continuity of people who are believed to be hereditary healthy people who are believed to be fit. Now, also is important. We haven't discussed it today, but I want to highlight two short but crucially important aspects. One, it is important to know that some eugenics highlighted the primacy of heredity. We mentioned Davenport, Galton, Plurts. So they really insisted heredity, shapes, character and behavior. But there were many other eugenics who actually insisted on the role of education environment. They were equally convincing eugenics in their own right. But they actually afforded less importance to heredity and more importance to environment and education. So not surprisingly, and here comes my second point about consensus and disagreement. There was much disagreement about which eugenic measures were deemed practical and which were deemed efficient. And we discussed today about sterilization, but of course there were a host of other eugenic measures that were deemed practical and feasible. Some of them based on a solid or better eugenic and genetic knowledge are simply based on the conditions of the particular country where eugenic movement operated. And also, many of these ideas were actually rejected by other group of eugenicists on ethical reasons or religious reasons. So they would have agreed with a scientific argument about the improvement of the human race, but they disagreed ethically from a humanistic or philosophical point of view, or they disagreed about which way to go forward because of religious beliefs. So this spectrum of opinion, I suppose, would be good to put on the table for our viewers and listeners. So then we highlighted a story which is already extremely complex, which is we want to add another layer. And the last thing I should like to say, if I have a fraction of a second, is about dehumanization, a word we all use throughout the panels. Clearly, eugenics, as we argued today, I think quite convincingly, dehumanized people. It dehumanized women, it dehumanized children and adults with disabilities. It dehumanized people who were believed to have criminal, innate criminal behavior. It dehumanized queer people, as we had. So what we can do now is if we were to really put forward anti eugenic ethos in science and anti eugenic behavior, at large, we need to dehumanize people. We need to go back to re-empower those voices to make them hurt, to allow them to enter the dialogue. And I think that was a wonderful interplay between between the two things today. In all papers, there was always the consistency of we're not just talking about data, we're not just talking about numbers, you know, 50 million people, 20,000 people sterilized. We need to know that every single number we mentioned, every single case we gave, there is a real person behind that. And that re-humanization process should be part of our coming to terms with the legacies of eugenics. Thank you. So thank you again, and we will see you tomorrow morning at, I believe, 10 o'clock. So thank you again. Join us for the second day. And everyone have a good evening. And we'll see you tomorrow. Thank you.