A CRITICAL HISTORY OF GENETICS AND ITS IMPLICATIONS IN CEE

Like other sciences, genetics produces both positive and negative outcomes. Any hypothesis regarding the genetic factors of health and disease shapes our vision of norms and pathology what feeds our idea of otherness. Each of the methods aimed at timely indicating hereditary diseases turns in improper medical surveillance and even oppression. The duality of genetics is reflected in a wide range of attitudes that influence not only individual choices but also politics and cultures when it comes to one of the fundamentals of human life: reproductive behavior. My project brings ongoing revision of achievements and falls of genetics into analytical lens of reproductive injustice institutionalized and legitimized coercion to give birth (by restricting access to contraception) and not to give birth (through involvement in measures to prevent the birth of a child with a congenital disorder). I retell the history of genetics to explain the ambivalence of scientific knowledge about human heredity as formed by two interrelated and mutually contested flows, multiple and obviously never-ending attempts to find the medical routs to human perfection on the one hand, and various strategies targeted with negating the idea of perfection with the help of interdisciplinary revision of the scientific progress in genetics on the other. The progress of genetics goes hand in hand with its historicization, and this project works through history of genetics and its meta- history or history of history. In the global history of medicine, the ambivalence of progress in genetics challenges previously established approaches to interpreting the impact of medical science on population politics as a part of public security. Historicizing genetics in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries is one of the fundamental prerequisites for developing this narration. The CEE countries have gone through different historical moments in which the strengthening of their geopolitical role as the region between West and East, or the capitalist and socialist parts of the world has brought medical expertise, including genetics, into line with the global security agenda. After World War I, and the increased role in preventing pandemics, prominent eugenicists in their respective nation states, contributed to the medicalization of particular social groups as carriers of infectious diseases. CEE eugenicists participated in preparing the UNESCO Statements on Race in the early 1950s, and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, socialist geneticists immediately intervened in the agenda of global population policy aimed at the survival of humanity in the face of looming nuclear catastrophe. The collapse of the socialism resulted in the liberalization of medicine, including the engagement of post-socialist medical genetics with the global fertility market. Today, the deep involvement of CEE countries in the multifaceted political crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the widespread reproduction of racial hierarchies in migration politics, makes the call for revising the global history of genetics even more pressing. In the end, it is essential for the historicization of CEE itself. The contemporary multiplicity of reproductive injustice in CEE countries calls for historicization through the lens of genetically informed argument. This project solves this task.