Race Unmasked by Michael Yudell

Author:Michael Yudell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI075000, Science/Philosophy and Social Aspects, SCI029000, Science/Life Sciences/Genetics and Genomics
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

SO LONG RACE… IN A FEW HUNDRED YEARS

Just four months after the Brown decision Curt Stern, a renowned expert on Drosophila and a human geneticist at the University of California, published a controversial article about race under the title “The Biology of the Negro” in the popular science magazine Scientific American. The article was a popularization of a scientific paper on the same subject that Stern had published just a year before.20 A German-born biologist, Stern, like Dobzhansky, came to Morgan’s fly room at Columbia on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship in the 1920s (Stern left a year before Dobzhansky arrived). Based on his work in Morgan’s lab, Stern produced several pioneering papers on the chromosomal basis of inheritance by looking at sex-linked chromosomal abnormalities in Drosophila. Stern’s early work was fundamental to the development of the chromosomal theory of inheritance. Stern returned to Germany for several years following his work at Columbia, coming back to the United States to work with Morgan—again on a Rockefeller scholarship—in 1932. Hitler’s rise to power a year later left Stern, a German Jew, with little choice but to stay in the United States. He spent most of the 1940s as the chairman of the Department of Zoology and the chair of the Division of Biological Sciences at the University of Rochester. In 1947 he joined the zoology faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he would remain until his retirement in 1970.21

In addition to his work on chromosomal inheritance, Stern would also make significant contributions through his work on somatic cell crossing over in Drosophila, his development of the concept of isoalleles (different forms of a gene that produce the same phenotype or very similar phenotypes),22 and his use of genetic mosaics to understand development in Drosophila. Stern also made an important contribution to radiation science. During World War II, Stern’s group at Rochester exposed Drosophila to low levels of radiation, concluding that “there is no threshold below which radiation fails to induce mutations.”23 Perhaps Stern’s greatest impact on the field was through his textbook The Principles of Genetics. First published in 1949, it quickly became the classic genetics primer for undergraduate and graduate students, selling more than 60,000 copies and appearing in three editions during his lifetime.24

Unlike others in the field whose participation in debates about human race differences were largely theoretical—neither Dobzhansky or Dunn, for example, had much research experience in the area of human genetics—Stern, beginning in the late 1930s, became increasingly involved in human genetics research, especially through teaching and training doctoral students. He published widely and lectured on the inheritance of skin color and on sex-linked inheritance and was, in 1957, the president of the American Society of Human Genetics. But Stern’s forays into race and genetics were not without controversy. A February 1946 lecture at the University of Rochester titled “Why Do People Differ?” stressed “the unscientific attitude of any race prejudice.” The program for the lecture pictured a cartoon with three girls, two of whom were white, one black.

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