 Hello, I am Eric Green, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, one of the 27 Institutes and Centers that make up the U.S. National Institutes of Health. I am delighted to welcome you to today's roundtable discussion on the promise and perils of social and behavioral genomics. This roundtable will feature three conversations with internationally recognized scholars, in each case with opportunities for you to ask questions of these experts. These sessions have been designed to delve into the complex history, the present-day science, and the communications challenges surrounding social and behavioral genomics. This event is the culmination of more than a year of NHGRI programming, beginning in December of 2021, about a set of difficult topics associated with the legacies and present-day realities of eugenics and scientific racism, and their connections to genetics and genomics. For example, last October, NHGRI held the first NIH symposium on disability and genomics, during which more than a dozen researchers detailed the myriad complexities of disability and ableism in clinical care and in medical research as it related to genomics. This led to a series of conversations across NIH about how the genomics community can respectfully acknowledge and incorporate the experiences of disabled individuals into our field's efforts, working to ensure that genomics benefits all. For those of you who may not already know, social and behavioral genomics is an emerging area in our field that involves exploring the enormous amounts of genomic data in search of correlations between specific genomic variants and observable behavioral characteristics and social skills. Researchers in social genomics use relatively new and increasingly powerful approaches, such as genome-wide association studies, known as GWAS, and polygenic risk scores, known as PRS, to find the slight differences that exist in every individual's genome and understand their possible roles in complex behavioral and social outcomes. For example, some social and behavioral genomic studies aim to determine the association between specific genomic variants and differences in occupational and educational attainment, as well as the possible genomic contributions to differences in reading and mathematical levels among elementary school students. Researchers are also using polygenic risk scores to predict an individual's risk for and severity of a wide variety of medical conditions, including various forms of mental illness. Increasingly, these approaches are being used to define an individual's quote-unquote risk of developing neurological and developmental disabilities, and even to determine the genomic contributions to highly abstract and characteristics such as intelligence quote-unquote. Now while social and behavioral genomics has the potential to make interesting contributions to our understanding of the complex connections between genotype and social and behavioral traits, including the complicated interplay between our genetics and our environment, much studies and the discussion of their findings have significant potential to be intensely stigmatizing. In recent years, the genomics community and NIH have become highly proactive in combating the misuse and outright weaponization of genomic information by white supremacists. And we have been horrified by any connection, even the most tenuous and spurious, between actual science and the pseudoscientific and deeply immoral justifications for genocidal violence. Today, we will have difficult conversations and raise important questions. We might also hear answers from our experts that may be disquieting to some. Nonetheless, those answers will be deeply informative. NHGRI, with more than 30 years of being at the forefront of genomics, has been at the vanguard of critical thinking about the societal implications of genomic advances. Today's event is no different in its timeliness and its significance. And we expect today's discussion will lead to even more meaningful public engagement on this and other related topics in the months and years to come. And with that, I will turn over today's event to Dr. Christopher Donahue, NHGRI Senior Historian, who will introduce the roundtable. Thank you, Eric, for that powerful opening statement. My name is Christopher Donahue. I am a white man with glasses, brown hair, and a light blue shirt. I'm the Senior Historian at the NHGRI, where I co-lead the History of Genomics Program. The History of Genomics Program is a unique research and public communications effort on the NIH campus. It supports research that explains the historical, bioethical, philosophical, and sociological complexities of genetics, genomics, and the human genome project. It also enriches that work through frank discussions around difficult conversations. These conversations concern the persistence of ableism, racism, and eugenics today, and the complex connections of these practices to the history of genetics and genomics. The roundtable on the promises and the perils of social and behavioral genomics is the latest in a series of public-facing discussions around such difficult topics, such as the history of eugenics and scientific racism, ableism and disability in the context of genetics and genomics, and the legacies of eugenics in genetic counseling and newborn sequencing and screening. This three-hour roundtable will focus on the history, present status of the science, and communications challenges around social and behavioral genomics. We will endeavor to give a rigorous yet accessible overview of the most pressing, methodological, and conceptual issues in social and behavioral genomics, while giving full voice to the historical and ethical concerns which animate discussions of its findings. We present such a complex terrain in an approachable setting with ample time for audience questions, because any emerging novel inquiry, such as social and behavioral genomics, has historical connections and ethical concerns which temper its claims and condition its progress. In this regard, historians would do well to better acknowledge the new and the distinctive and scientists the historically contingent and ethically fraught. Individual genomics, which most broadly seeks to trace how minute individual genetic differences, which are defined by increasingly powerful and scalable genomic tools, influence everyday social and political behaviors, and can help to explain the formation of character and personality in the context of social structures, to paraphrase the sociologist Hans Gareth. At the core of social and behavioral genomics is a debate about how central human genetic diversity is to social and cultural life. It acknowledges that genetics and environment, as well as social structure, social status, and social roles are all of great importance for understanding the social, in quotations, social success of the individual from birth to death. And with all this in mind, some words of caution before we begin our discussion. Although today's social genomicists are light years away from measuring skulls or defining quote unquote racial tendencies, like quote unquote drive, and quote unquote acquisitiveness, it is not the case that eugenicists only cared about quote unquote good genes and not about the environment or social institutions. The differences then lie not only in the precision of the genetic analyses, but the vastly improved descriptions of the complexities of social life and the increasing diversity of research cohorts and the scientific community at large. As important is the much more nuanced accounts of the role of genes and the sometimes hundreds of thousands of variants. Nevertheless, social and behavioral genomics resists comparisons with eugenics not simply due to these admittedly blocky comparisons, but out of the sheer fact that the scientific community has acknowledged the reality of eugenics and scientific racism, and in doing so has developed a much more reflexive inquiry. Genetics and genomics are now sciences that learn from the past and sometimes present to humanizing rhetoric and practices. As a consequence, we are much more self aware and much more vigilant. All of these issues will be discussed at length during our roundtable. It is therefore my honor to turn the program over to our first moderator, Nneka Ghosh. Thanks Chris. My name is Nneka Ghosh. I'm a PhD candidate in the history of science at Harvard University, where I study the history of biology in the post-war in the United States. Before we begin our panel, I'm going to introduce all our panelists. Christopher Donahue is the historian of the National Human Genome Research Institute. He has edited and co-edited two journal collections since 2018 to others on vitalism and the contemporary life sciences and perspectives on the Human Genome Project are under review. He is also completing a book under contract for Central European University Press entitled The Master Race in That Sense, Defenses of Eugenics and Sterilization After the Second World War. Eric Perence is a senior research scholar at the Hastings Center and director of the Center's Initiative in Bioethics and Humanities. He is a founding member of Columbia University's NIH-funded Center for Excellence in Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project and is a fellow of the Center for Neuroscience and Society at the University of Pennsylvania. With his co-PI, Michelle Meyer, he is completing a project called Wrestling with Social and Behavioral Genomics. Alexandra Menastern is the Dean of Humanities and Professor of English and History and the Institute of Society and Human Genetics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Professor Stern's research has focused on the uses and misuses of genetics in the US and Latin America. She is also the founder and co-director of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which uses mixed methods to study patterns and experiences of eugenic sterilization in the 20th century in the United States. This research has informed the recently passed reparations bill to compensate survivors of compulsory sterilization in California. Melinda Mills is a Nuffield Professor of Demography and Director of the Leopard Human Center for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford and Professor of Data Science and Public Health Policy at the Department of Genetics and the Department of Economics, Econometrics and Finance at Groningen in the Netherlands. Her research is in the area of social genomics, where she led the first GWAS on reproductive behavior. She also co-created GWW.GWASDiversityMonitor.com, which highlights the lack of diversity in genomic samples. Our panel today is going to define social and behavioral genomics, situated historically, and discuss tensions between the science and the abuses of the science. Because many in this line of research promise to reveal valuable, if not revolutionary information about ourselves, our history and the future, my question to each of the panelists is as follows. What are the relevant conversations that researchers in social and behavioral genomics need to draw from before they promise transformative political change? We will hear first from Professor Melinda Mills. Thank you very much, Aninka. So I'm Melinda Mills and I'm what they call in the United Kingdom where I am, non-British, other white. I'm in my early fifties. I'm wearing green and I'm looking tired because it's evening here. I'm a practicing science scientist in the area of social genomics on the panel. And I think it's already been sufficiently described. So we're looking at really complex behavioral phenotypes or traits. So things such as educational attainment or what I study, the timing of having your first birth or number of children, well-being and other sort of complex behavioral outcomes. But it's also about looking at the role of genetic makeup in relation to an individual's social environment, so the family that they grew up in or the neighborhood they live in, for example. So I think we have to think about when we think about complex behavioral traits, they can also be things such as obesity or BMI or even things like type two diabetes. So behavior manifests itself in multiple ways. So we were asked to think about, you know, what are the relevant conversations here? And I'll just very shortly highlight three. I think in my area of research, looking at reproduction and reproductive choice and timing, the exclusion of biology and genetics could actually be very detrimental to scientific progress. So I'm in the area of demography and sociology, and it was quite socially deterministic. And we're realizing when women and men are postponing having children that they're actually increasingly having sort of biological or genetically related issues related to infertility. So for that reason, it made a lot of sense to integrate this into my thinking and to further understand in this area. I think the second thing is it was already highlighted is sociogenomics and social behavioral genomics is more about it's more than just studying complex behavioral phenotypes. It's also understanding gene environment interplay. So gene environment interaction, so the effect of the genotype, it varies across different environments and it could vary with if you grew up in a family with high resources, for example. But also in individuals, genotype exposes them to certain environments. So I think those kind of factors are important. And just the final point is what's relevant in this conversation, at least from my standpoint, is the increasing amount of scrutiny that we're having, not just in behavioral genomics, but also in other areas of research as well, is looking at what are we measuring and do we really understand what we're measuring and looking at the composition of the data itself. So it's really hard to measure everything when you're looking at these complex behavioral traits. Do we understand the biology? Do we understand pleotropy, which is one gene influencing more traits? And everything seems to be very highly polygenic. And I often say in our recent study of age at first birth, it has a very high genetic overlap and correlation with educational attainment of 0.74. So you really have to understand what are we actually measuring. And the genetic effect often operates the environmental pathways. And a recent study led by Neil Davies in nature genetics showed just this point. And just finally, as was highlighted before, we're really concerned about the lack of diversity in genomic samples, not just by ancestry, but by the representation. So 72% of genetic studies were based on samples from just three countries. As a social behavioral scientist, that's worrying to me because complex traits don't have the same effect everywhere across time. I mean, we have to look at regions, nations, ages, historical periods. And I think that there's so much to be done in this area. But I'll hand it back over to our panel chair now. Thank you. Thank you, Professor Moose. I now turn it over to Chris. Thanks so much, Nenika, for your question. I'm sort of going to situate this two ways, one of which is to make a sort of broad point about how disciplines and how sciences develop from at least my perspective as a historian. And I think one of the real challenges in describing and situating either present day or historically social behavioral genomics or social science genetics is that it is still a relatively, you know, sort of relatively developing or young inquiry. And if you look at the history of genomics, the history of the human genome project, the history of genetics, you have it's essentially like a 30 year process. So if you look at the late 1980s and you look at, for example, the cost of sequencing in the late 1980s and at the start of the human genome project in 1990, you have some really elegant experiments and some really excellent data that you also have sequencing. And that is very expensive and time consuming and not scalable and hard to do. And it really took really almost three decades for there to be a series of revolutions in the scalability of sequencing and cost reductions in technology improvements and also in bioinformatics, whereby you have a technology of an inquiry, which among other things sort of produced the telomere to telomere. The first a complete gapless DNA sequence. So in many ways, we are thinking about a technology and thinking about an inquiry that is still in a state of development. And a lot of things, I think for a lot of people are very exciting and very novel, but there is still a great deal and a number of unanswered questions just from a scientific and technological point. G-WAS is very well established, polygenic scoring is very well established, but there's issues around missing heritability in the case of G-WAS and portability of polygenic risk scores across ancestry groups and even within ancestry groups in terms of social and economic status. I think as a historian and I think this is becoming ever more clear with the acknowledgement by ASHD and their public apology and the report that was issued yesterday that eugenics and scientific racism did not end in 1945. So because it did not end in 1945, you have support of eugenics and scientific racism among broad segments of the medical community and medical and genitized community well after the close of the Second World War and until relatively recently. So, and this is because many, many scientists after the Second World War with full knowledge of the Nazi horrors nevertheless became very concerned about the so-called relaxation of natural selection with the advancement of civilization. So you have, for example, Kurt Stern and this is a quote from Stern himself that quote, too much reliance on medical and surgical progress may lead to an ever increasing number of persons whose normal function is only made possible by the performance of major operations, special drugs or diets or by regularly repeated drug transfusions. At some stage it seems preventive eugenic measures will become true, will become truly urgent. This is Stern speaking. And I think the reason why the ASHD acknowledgment is so important and the reason why a knowledge that eugenics is not only a very recent historical phenomenon or the support of eugenics is a very recent historical phenomenon is that this needs to very much temper any sort of any sort of easy discontinuities between genetics as a science and eugenics as an ideology and very much needs to condition our sense of when individuals want to implement progressive measures in the name of science that we do so in full acknowledgment that eugenics is still practice. There are attested examples of involuntary sterilization that scientific racism is very much real and very much present and that up until relatively recently there were broad segments of the scientific community who believe eugenics to be scientific and believe eugenics to be scientific and practicable with the best of intentions. So all of this needs to be, I think, considered in how we think about social genomics, how we think about the differences between social genomics and older, more problematic versions of behavior genetics and eugenics and what it is that when we think about the complex social traits, what are the connections being made and how can we think about the weight of history in talking about this science. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. I'll now ask Professor Stern. Hello. Hello, everyone. Thank you, Nanika. I'm Alexandra Minister and actually no relation to Kurt Stern, by the way, just so you know. I am sitting in my office at UCLA. I recently moved here. I'm very happy to be connected to the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA where we're taking up many of these questions. I'm a white woman with a auburnish hair because I've had it colored and I have dark rim glasses and I'm wearing a black and gray scarf. So I'm going to pick up on some of the points particular that Chris made really thinking about the value of the historical lens in exploring some of these questions. And if you go all the way back to Galton and his 1883 coining of the term eugenics and his 1869 book, which was actually one of his first books on aristogenesis, as he called it, we can see 150 year trajectory of eugenics. And the historical lens is very helpful in allowing us to and giving us tools to think about both the continuities and the discontinuities between eugenics, genetics and social and behavioral genomics. And I think there are some kind of key concepts we can pull out of historical questions. The first is that if you go back to the beginnings of eugenics, it was always about prediction and control and predictability, particularly of biological human phenomenon, was one of the key elements that eugenicists wanted to control. And so I think we need to remember that. And when we think about genetics and genomics, ASCOW, control and prediction and predictability are being imagined, envisioned and potentially implemented or poised to be utilized. The second relates to categories and adjectives that Chris was using, particularly the idea of normal or abnormal. I think one of looking across eugenics in the US and really across the world, what you find are the elaboration of categories that are often binary and they revolve around ideas of fitness and unfitness, normality, abnormality, superiority and inferiority. And again and again, one of the kind of main activities of eugenicists across the globe in the early 20th century was to develop measurement sciences to put people into these categories and then often to implement policies to control the reproduction or potentially with immigration, the entry of the unfit into a society and encourage the propagation of the so-called fit or the normal. It's really important to remember that if you look at, for example, the 32 states that passed eugenic sterilization laws in the US that relied on these categories, these categories were the drivers of sterilization laws and they are ableist categories. So that takes us into the realm of thinking about disability studies and disability politics, which is one of the most continuous threads that we can find that connects the eugenics of yesteryear to some of the very fraught questions around genetics and genomics today. I won't go into a longer kind of explanation of the development of eugenics in the United States and how it built on preexisting racism and ableism. That's something that might come out in the Q and A. My point is really to remind us and to be part of a conversation that has this much broader historical arc and to ask questions about what that means in the context of thinking about continuities and discontinuities. I would say that once you open that up, it really cautions us against any kind of hubris. And so I applaud very heartily the ASG, the ASHG apology for eugenics. And I think that it's, I've just had a chance to glance at the report and I really appreciate the timelines. I mean, that is speaking to continuities and discontinuities. However, even if we recognize that history and make amends for it, to some extent, we always have to be careful about the hubris that's associated with such kinds of, in a way, moralizing actions. So that's one thing, because we see again and again, genetics will promise a lot, but not necessarily be able to deliver. And then people will be categorized in problematic ways along the way and sometimes harmed. And that relates to my second point, and this really focuses on, thinking about the long history of eugenics across particularly the 20th century, it's not only that eugenics was a corrosive ideology, it caused harm to people. So it harmed people and harm people and their bodies and their lives and their families. So eugenics resulted in individuals being institutionalized against their will, being sterilized against their will, forbidden from marriage due to reasons of supposed disability and or racial classification. And of course, we know the most heinous example of harm in Nazi Germany, in which over 6 million people were murdered, hundreds of thousands were sterilized due to euthanasia, work to death, or based due to untreated diseases and in human conditions. So I just want to remind people that eugenics has caused harm and in the work that we do with the sterilization and social justice lab, we see how this harm is connected to intergenerational trauma in particular communities. And I think it's really important to acknowledge that and to think about what that means for doing this work and what it means for the kind of the human aspect of doing this work all the way up into 2023 and how to handle that. And then finally, I'll just throw out a provocation which might not be a provocation. In my most recent book, which I wrote about a white nationalist in the early 21st century and really what happened in the 2010s with the emergence of the alt-right, writing that book was motivated in large part by being interested in the ways in which white nationalists were mobilizing and repackaging eugenic arguments, celebrating Madison Grant, celebrating the kind of demographic control that eugenicists in the early 20th century wanted and really motivated by the same types of demographic anxieties and concerns with about race, suicide and white extinction. So I think we can draw a fairly durable line between the eugenicists slash white nationalists of the early 20th century and the white nationalists and white supremacists that we see today. And these ideologies we have to be careful to not classify them off the cuff as fringe ideologies because they are in constant interplay in what I call the erosion zone between, kind of the far right and more mainstream ideas. And I mean this in a general societal sense, not so much in speaking directly to questions of social and behavioral genomics, but I think it's important to see that those ideologies have had a lot of staying power and that for many white nationalists today, Madison Grant is just as important to them as he was to eugenicists in the 1920s who were changing immigration laws in the United States and making them exceedingly restrictive. So with that, I will stop and thank you for listening. Thank you. I hand it over to Dr. Perens. My name is Eric Perens. I am a white man with gray hair, a gray beard and black horn rim glasses and then wearing a purple shirt, a dark purple shirt. I'm eager to jump into the conversation that's been begun already by Chris and Alex and Melinda and Chris, but first I want to try to respond directly to the question that Nanika asked me to speak to in not more than three minutes. Her question again was, what are the relevant conversations that researchers in social and behavioral genomics need to draw from before they promise transformative political change? So I'm gonna use SPG as the acronym for social and behavioral genomics. Well, just as I think it would be a mistake for social and behavioral genomics critics to promise transformative and negative political change, I think it would be a mistake for SPG researchers to promise transformative and positive political change. It seems to me, and I don't think there's really gonna be much disagreement here or maybe there will be, it seems to me that the facts of the matter are simply too complex for the purely dystopian or purely utopian prediction to be helpful. What we need instead, I think, are conversations like the one we're having today where we who lean critical regarding SPG research and we who lean enthusiastic, get a chance to wrestle together with the incredibly complicated facts of the matter. I'm proud to say that for the last three and a half years, my colleague, Michelle Meyer at Geisinger and I had been co-leading a working group called wrestling with social and behavioral genomics, colon risks, potential benefits and ethical responsibility. Our extraordinarily talented working group is highly diverse in many ways, including racially, but perhaps most relevantly, our working group includes people who do SPG research for a living and people including historians, STS scholars and LC scholars who for a living think critically about the emergence of new techno sciences. And we're hoping that our project report, which will appear in the March, April, Hastings Center report will be a useful tool for others who want to wrestle with the questions we did. Among the questions that our working group grappled with and that I think should be part of the conversation that SPG researchers and others should be asking in the future among those questions are, as we've already heard, what is the historical and social context into which the results of such research will fall? What can and what cannot the science tell us about social and behavioral outcomes? What do geneticists mean when they refer to within scare quotes, genetic ancestry? What would be the harm of failing to diversify biobanks to include people whose genetic ancestries are not in scare quotes European? What harm might occur if, and it is not, if it were scientifically possible to compare continental level genetic ancestry groups with respect to sensitive phenotypes? What are the potential benefits, including using PGI's or PGS's polygenic scores to do better social and health science research? And of course, what does responsible conduct and communication of SPG research, SPG research entail? So in answer to Nannika's question about the needed relevant conversations, I think we need conversations that recognize and wrestle with the complexity of the historical, social and scientific facts. If we do that, I think we will avoid the temptation to offer unduly dystopian or unduly utopian predictions of political transformation. Thank you. Thank you to all the panelists for your comprehensive answers. And I think it sets us up for the next question that I had in mind. So what I'm hearing is that, and this comes up, it's a common theme in the history of science, especially in the history of post-war science, when in the 60s and 70s, a lot of activists had concerns about the directions in which certain kinds of science were going, such as nuclear science, genetic recombination, et cetera, et cetera. And to them, the scientists who did that research said, well, you're kind of hindering progress. You're hindering scientific progress. And I feel like I'm hearing similar tones when researchers in social and behavioral genomics caution us to not ignore genetic data when it comes to these important social and behavioral variables. But I'm also hearing a lot of concern from historians and ethicists about accounting for, you know, but the proliferation of these studies. So I would like you all to respond to how we manage this tension between, you know, criticizing this kind of research and also not making it seem like we're in the way of scientific progress. I can start my clicker. Yes, I will start. And I'm sure that there's many others that could respond as well too. So I think in some ways it's, we're often having a mismatch in terminology and understanding. And I think that's why this kind of forum is just so important. I think there, you gave the example, there was the differences between ancestry and race and how they're understood between, you know, genetics and how they're understood in the social behavioral sciences and how what Alex was saying, you know, the white supremacists are matching these. And I think there's often we see in the public discussion a really a misunderstanding from both sides, I have to say, of not being able to explain the differences between these things. You know, and genetics is based a lot on geography and geographical variation, at least how geneticists study it. And you have this non-random mating and that's based on geography. And that's why variants are more common in some parts of the country, the world and others. And their statistical tools are often made to look at these things and they look at terms such as population stratification. That's really hard to translate to a general audience. And those terms don't map equally or they're not related to any sort of conceptions of race, which you call in the US or in Europe and other places they use the term ethnicity and they just, those terms race and ethnicity don't have a biological basis. And I think that these terms are often equated. But I do think there's another side to it too. And there are some researchers that enter into the field without realizing this history that Chris and Alex and Eric discussed about. And without realizing that history, that deep history of ranking and measurements. And we're often these quantitative researchers were focused on measuring it without standing back and looking at that. You can enter into a terrain where your research could be readily and easily misused. So there was lots of groups, our research, the groups of the social science genetics association, the consortium that we'll be joining later, really worked on frequently asked questions trying to explain things. Other groups worked on videos engaging with participant groups. I think it's really important to make sure that your message gets out in a clear way. And I think that particularly with this kind of science compared to all of the other papers I work with, you really have to think about participants. You have to think about stigma tapes, how you'll stigmatize certain groups and how your research can be misused. And I think particularly, some researchers were really caught unaware. And I think it's that history and that dialogue that's essential. Chris, would you like to respond? Sure, I think Nenika, your question really resolves to progress for whom. And I think we can only have progress when there's progress for everyone. And I know, just speaking from the perspective of disability studies, that a lot of medical and scientific progress from the context of disability because of the ways in which contemporary and past science has medicalized disability, which I mean reduce disability to a series of symptoms and to a series of conditions, all of which are portrayed negatively, that often have little or no connection to the actual lived experience of disabled people. So I think when you think about progress, you always have to think about progress for whom and what does progress mean? And how can progress be equitable? How can progress be ethical and how can progress be moral in ways that don't lead to these kinds of stratifications in which one group benefits and another group is deeply harmed. So that's what I would say on that. I mean history is really important for understanding those connections. Dr. Behrens, did you want to respond to that? I entirely agree with Chris that the question is how to go forward without hurting people who already hurt. Naniqa, did you have a further question that you wanted to press me on? No, just about communicating this line of criticism to scientists such that it doesn't seem like we're coming in the way of research progress and scientific progress. Ah, I see, I see, I'm sorry, I didn't understand. Well, I think that, you know, meetings exactly like this one are very helpful. I should mention, and I should mention that there are many scientists who are already taking significant strides to communicate clearly what their research does and does not mean. My colleague, Michelle Meyer, is one of the people who can take a lot of credit along with Dan Benjamin, who is one of our panelists today in a later panel. They can take a lot of credit for, as can Daphne Marchenko who has created this repository for these FAQs that Dan and Michelle and others have been insisted on creating, these FAQs aim to communicate what the science doesn't, doesn't say. And by the way, I'm very familiar with, you know, the complaints that FAQs are not a panacea, they are not a panacea, I'm alas, I don't think they'll make any, they made any difference to the Buffalo shooter. I don't think he read them, I don't think he would care if he knew of their existence. But my point is that there are scientists who are increasingly attuned to these questions and are together with people in bioethics and other disciplines trying to communicate what they're doing. I'm not saying this job is done, plainly there's a lot more work to do. Fortunately, a session like today is gonna help spread the word about the importance of this sort of understanding. I can add one more historical dimension into this, which is if we look at, you know, focusing on the United States, if we look at eugenics from, let's say, 1900 to 1960s, yes, it was popularized, it was captured in books and articles and it was embedded into some of the starting points of genetic science as discussed in the recent ASHG report. However, I think we need to do more thinking across these different disciplines and interdisciplines about what shifts in the role of the state and the role of industry mean, and as well as academic medicine. So let me clarify that. If we look at the harm caused by eugenics, you know, until the 1970s when things began to change with the repeal of certain laws and let's say the Loving v. Virginia case and the change in immigration laws in the 1960s, the harm caused by eugenics was often coming from the state. And then the state was, you know, was removed from that process and the kind of, well, not completely, but the state controlled eugenics that we associate with eugenics began to shift and the state moved out of the way. There are more ethics appeared, you know, there was more reproductive freedom, there were dramatic shifts. So for example, by the 80s, there were safeguards that were put on federally funded sterilizations to protect vulnerable individuals and populations. That happened as academic medical centers were growing and getting more federal grants and also as increasingly by, you know, the 90s and 2000s, genetic and reproductive technologies were becoming increasingly commercialized. And there's been a lot of debate in the medical community about conflict of interest and conflict of commitment when it comes to commercializing and participating. And, you know, there's both, in the ideal world, there's kind of strict lines between that and kind of firewalls so that people's research is not compromised by that. But I would say that, you know, we still need to ask questions today about, you know, if we look at the kind of bad state actor of the past, what are some of the ways in which the commercialization of genetics as well as social and behavioral genomics, how is that problematic and how in kind of the rush to build a consumer base or to build popularity or to make visible or to sell, you know, has that allowed for the continuation of eugenic ideas in some of this baggage? So that's just kind of a broad historical structural take on how does genetics move across time? Where is it taking place? And what happens to the state in all of this and can, does eugenics still exist without kind of a heavy-handed state? Well, yes, it certainly can. What does that look like? And how can we be aware of that? So I'll just kind of throw that out there in my attempt to, you know, traverse along many decades in understanding these continuities and discontinuities. Thank you, thank you all. We'll now move to Q&A. And before we go into Q&A, I just want to amplify this message that I received from another analyst who will be coming on later in the day about these FAQs, that while they do appreciate that these, that researchers are trying to be as clear as possible, FAQs have been around since the beginning and we still find ourselves here with rising violence and weaponization based on the very research that has ample disclaimers. I'll just go to the first question now. May I respond? Oh, sure. Just to be clear, I do not believe that there's a way to prevent genetic information from being weaponized. Let me forgive me for a moment, but I do a lot of work in the disability rights and justice space. And some of our most important work in the 1990s was to make the argument that people should get truly informed consent before they get a selective abortion so that they can come to understand what it is they are doing. This critique from the disability rights community was in reaction to or out of a concern that people were getting abortions without knowing anything about what life with disability is really like, okay? Lo and behold, 30 years later, the phrase truly informed consent has been weaponized by one member at least of the Supreme Court. I think we have to wrap our minds around the idea that any act or concept can be weaponized. And I think we have to be careful about the fantasy that there's something that we academics can do to once and for all, ensure that such weaponization doesn't occur. Thank you, Eric. We'll just start with the Q and A. There's a question, it's anonymous. Can you address how the NIH perpetuates ableism and the oppression of people with disabilities rather than removing that ableism and oppression? Chris, would you like to respond? Sure. So this is where I'm gonna just put on my hat of someone who works in disability studies. I think that the comment is about the tendency of genetics and biomedical research to reduce disability as I've noticed to a series of conditions to medicalize it and to essentially view it as negative from a medical point of view. I think the NIH has done a great deal, particularly in the last few years, of thinking about and opening up the conversation around disability in which really tries to enable other models and other understandings of disability which are much closer to the lived experience of disabled individuals. I think the context of the NIH in the framework of disability is making sure that you have enough discussion of some of the medical aspects of some disabilities with the firm acknowledgement that the medical aspect or the some characteristics of any disability do not in any way fully reflect the complexity of disabled individuals every day. So that's kind of my first answer to that question. Thank you. The next question, I think this might be for Professor Melinda Mills. They ask, what do you hope to learn by linking genetic variation and non-disease related behavior traits and give an example that you think highlights a best possible outcome? Thank you for that question. Yeah, so my research has always focused on things where I think that there is likely a plausible biological link with what I'm looking at. So I look at behavioral phenotypes, but the things that I've been focusing on are reproduction. So related to when you have your first children, number of children entry into age at first sex, for example. So for me, what I really want to achieve is a few things I want to under. So as I said before, this is often studied in a very socially deterministic way saying, well, it's all about childcare. It's all about housing. It's all about education and remaining in education. And I started to realize, as I said in my introduction, people were postponing and having children much later and some people were really having a lot of fertility and infertility problems. And there's virtually no examination of men. So all the infertility and everything was focused on women. So we thought, well, this is really interesting to look at this in a, so when do people have children? Why do they have them and how many do they have? And we really saw that it differed in terms of as people aged. So our polygenic score differed across time, but it really differed. And this, you can say this for many of the complex behavioral phenotypes across socioeconomic environment and background. And that's often intersectional as they use the term in sociology with multiple types of deprivation. It's linked to ethnic background. It's linked to lots of different types of things. And so the question was, well, what is biological and what is social here? Could you have, for example, a breakdown in your immune system from being under chronic stress for such long periods of time in the social environment that could result in infertility or you not achieving your best representation of your cognitive ability or something, which I don't study, but others do. So I think it's really important to say that social people that study socio-genomics aren't either for or against genomics. We're just searching to try to understand what we're studying in a better way. So, and if it turns out to be very small genetic effect, which it is in many cases, it's just a small piece, it's one piece of the puzzle, that's logical, that makes sense for complex behavioral phenotypes. But I just repeat again, it's things like BMI and obesity and type 2 diabetes that are also quite behavioral as well too. So I think it can help us understand more complex behaviors as well too that might be disease related. Thank you, Melinda. There's a bit of discourse around, I think what Dr. Barron's has said and maybe all panelists can respond. It's a commentary, it says, while additional dialogue about this issue is important, it is equally important that researchers are cognizant of a sense of urgency simply because specific minoritized communities continue to suffer as a result of the history of racialized science in this country. They are concerned about the seeming lack of urgency. And if research that applies to, there is research that applies to targeted populations, researchers have a responsibility to ensure that those populations benefit from that work. And having, it seems like it's a comment about a lack of urgency, would any panelists would like to respond to that? Chris, would you like to respond? I can make a quick comment and say in the work that we've been doing with our lab, and this relates to a comment I saw in the Q&A with affected communities, I do feel a sense of great urgency in this work, particularly because we've seen that, forced sterilization and this kind of a contradicts one of the points I was making before about the heavy-handed role of the state, the state has continued to create environments where forced sterilization continues to happen, whether on the federal state or other levels and vulnerable communities, often communities and women of color are affected. And that's why I think it's really important in at least in the work I do, and I know that others on the panel have done this as well, is to really work with affected communities and bring them into the conversation and often ask them to frame the questions and the conversation. This has been very much, has very much informed the work that has happened with the coalition work around the compensation for forced sterilization in California, which is the third state to do so after North Carolina and Virginia. And we might see this happening in other states, such as Utah and Vermont and so on. So these are opportunities if this compensation or reparations happen for there to be very much of a diverse set of stakeholders involved and to make sure that it's as inclusive as possible. Thank you. Nenika, I'm not sure what exactly the question is getting at it. I think everyone on the panel feels great urgency to right the wrongs of the past and to attempt to reduce rather than exacerbate inequality. So I for one feel the needs for those things, that those seem extraordinarily urgent to me. So I'm not sure what, well, I hope that nothing I said sounded like, I don't think those things are urgent, I think they are. I think when we're talking about maybe the helplessness that some academics feel when it comes to the misuses of this research. So I think that that might have, that that that can give rise to another conversation, which would be I think fruit food have at that point. I think Chris wanted to say something. So, Eric, I think we've discussed this before and we'll continue to discuss this, but I think I have sort of two responses. The first is that you have an obligation to almost counter-weaponize this. So I think that that might have, that can give rise to another conversation, to almost counter-weaponize something even if there's no effect. And that's an ethical rather than a practical one. I also know that you can't necessarily stop people from weaponizing things, but you can put in sort of educational and pedagogical elements to reduce that. You can also, I think, really tell, and in my research on alt-right networks, I've noticed that when alt-right individuals talk about science, they tend to talk about science, particularly around race, in ways to say this is what geneticists actually think and that in fact, because they haven't said anything, they actually really think this. So I think being very clear and being very programmatic and saying this is wrong, this is due to scientific is extraordinarily important because otherwise, alt-right actors assume that silence from the scientific community is a kind of consent and that the opposite is the case. And I think that needs to be very clear. I'm so grateful for the chance to clarify because once again, my response, my impassioned one earlier was in reaction to the suggestion that FAQs are not all that effective. And I just want to underline that FAQs, although they are not as effective as I would like them to be, are, I believe, extraordinarily important educational efforts. I think they are one tiny part of what must be much, much larger efforts. But I hope nothing I said suggested that I am not committed to educational efforts on this, on behalf of reducing ignorance regarding what this science doesn't, doesn't mean. There's nothing about which I care more really. I'm glad we're able to end on a note where we were able to clarify that and all panelists were able to clarify that. And I think we're also ending on a note where we can tie into this apology that's come from the ASHG on the harms that are caused by silence because that is one of the key takeaways from that statement and report. And with that, I'd like to thank all of the panelists for their time. I'm sorry, there's a lot of questions coming in and I'm sorry we couldn't get to all of them, but the panelists will have a chance to respond to them in a written form. And with that, I'm going to end a short break and we will return at 2.10. Thank you so much.