The historiography of medical and human genetics has recently begun to re-examine the question of the links between the emergence of this field of biomedicine, at the turn of the 1940s-1950s, and eugenics. This development has made it possible to reassess the importance of field investigations, carried out far from the clinic, in the work of the pioneers of medical genetics. However, most of the historical work carried out to date in this field has focused on the United States and Great Britain. This presentation aims to broaden the scope of the analysis in a number of ways. First, it focuses on a case that has received little attention: a series of investigations into the prevalence of thalassaemia in Italy and the subsequent attempts to control the disease. Secondly, the Italian case sheds new and interesting light on the role of transnational networks and collaboration between European and North American geneticists and physicians in the articulation of human genetics and eugenics. Finally, the example of haemoglobinopathies proves extremely useful in reflecting on the intertwining of these very genetic and eugenic motives in the emergence of carrier screening in the general population.

Sickle cell disease has been used as a research model for many decades by different disciplines. In 1949, in an article by Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, it was named the first “molecular disease”, when molecular biology was still an avant-garde field of study. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, many researchers in physical anthropology, hematology, and human genetics had already been looking for sickle cell red blood cells in the populations of the Global South to interpret evolution, migration, and human diseases. At the dawn of the 21st century, genetics centered sickle cell disease on the studies of human genome editing. By analyzing the knowledge production of sickle cell disease in genetics, I seek to demonstrate that the social invisibility that people with sickle cell disease experienced in the 20th century contrasts with their notoriety in various fields of study in biomedicine. In the specific case of Brazil, population genetics, which became institutionalized in the 1960s, was based heavily on studies into the presence of variant hemoglobins. However, health policies aimed at this group of individuals only emerged timidly in the 1990s and only took on national proportions in 2005. The disparity between the use of sickle cell disease as a research topic and its non-existence as a public health problem until the 1990s in Brazil is striking.

Since the 1930s, Japanese botanists from Kyoto (Imperial) University have collected plants globally as genetic resources. Inspired by Russian geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, Kihara Hitoshi (1893–1986), a prominent Japanese plant geneticist, started at the university a tradition of combining the data of plants’ genetic distributions with archaeological, historical, and ethnographic records. Together with his disciples, his group produced an alternative narrative to the Eurocentric view of world history, based on plants. I examine how they viewed the past of the world through crop varieties, how the view changed from the 1930s to the 1960s, and how the plant-based "scientific" narrative was consumed widely by the Japanese public in search of the Japanese identity.