Scaling up: Human genetics as a Cold War network

In this commentary I explore how the papers here illuminate the processes of collection that have been so central to the history of human genetics since 1945. The development of human population genetics in the Cold War period produced databases and biobanks that have endured into the present, and that continue to be used and debated. In the decades after the bomb, scientists collected and transferred human biological materials and information from populations of interest, and as they moved these biological resources or biosocial resources acquired new meanings and uses. The papers here collate these practices and map their desires and ironies. They explore how a large international network of geneticists, biological anthropologists, virologists and other physicians and scientists interacted with local informants, research subjects and public officials. They also track the networks and standards that mobilized the transfer of information, genealogies, tissue and blood samples. As Joanna Radin suggests here, the massive collections of human biological materials and data were often understood to be resources for an “as-yet-unknown” future. The stories told here contain elements of surveillance, extraction, salvage and eschatology.