A Selective Amnesia – Sterilizing The History Of Genetics

We may be in the midst of a critical historical turning point in social justice. The confluence of the Black Lives Matter movement, #MeToo, and the COVID pandemic has led to the re-evaluation and re-surfacing of abuses, injustices, biases, and plain old hatred. Jimi Hendrix’s take on The Star Spangled Bannerseems to be the right musical score for the moment.

Perhaps then this is a good time for geneticists to look in our own closet and assess some skeletons that we know are there but seem to prefer to ignore or downplay. A good place to start is with the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), one of the oldest and largest professional human genetics organizations.

So what is my gripe with ASHG, an organization I admire and respect? It all started when I used an internet search engine to look for the ASHG website to obtain information about the 2020 annual conference.

What caught my eye was the name right there in bright blue in the next to last line – Franz Josef Kallmann. Kallmann – more accurately...