A witness seminar on the history of the Human Gene Mapping Workshops

Abstract

In June 2015 the transcript of a ‘Witness Seminar’ on the history of the Human Gene Mapping Workshops c.1973–c.1991 was published by the History of Modern Biomedicine Research Group (www.histmodbiomed.org/witsem/vol54). The publication came from a meeting held in March 2014 to which key, mostly UK-based scientists contributed, two of whom had participated in the first Human Gene Mapping Workshop in 1973, and many of whom had been involved in subsequent HGMW (Table 1). Table 1 Locations and dates of the Human Gene Mapping Workshops. Witness Seminars are meetings to which a group of people who have been involved in particular discoveries, debates or events are invited to share their reminiscences and memories of ‘what really happened, the stories behind the published literature’ to quote Professor Tilli Tansey who heads the Group, and who developed this approach (Jones & Tansey, 2015). Through the use of oral history in a group format, the Witness Seminar publications make a unique contribution to the international corpus of primary historical resources on twentieth century human/medical/clinical genetics, with a focus on the life stories of UK-based geneticists. The group format enables participants in the seminars to challenge, corroborate, and/or expand on the reminiscences of their peers. Although these Witness Seminar events and publications differ in style and content from the more traditional one-to-one approach to oral history, they also relate to the body of interviews conducted with scientists and clinicians by other individuals and institutions, such as: the Genetics and Medicine Historical Network of Cardiff University led by Professor Peter Harper (Genetics and Medicine Historical Network's, 2016); ‘Conversations in Genetics’ by the Genetics Society of America with USA-based scientists (Conversations in Genetics, 2016), and the National Human Genome Research Institute's staff interviews in Bethesda (NHGRI, 2016). Similar to other high-quality oral history resources, the Witness Seminar publications are intended to interact with many other primary source materials which researchers and interested publics may engage with; for example, the ‘Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics’ archival collections of geneticists and related organisations digitised by the Wellcome Library, London, in collaboration with other institutions (Codebreakers, 2016). The Witness Seminar publications also stand alone as significant historical narratives of biomedicine in their own right. Each Witness Seminar meeting is facilitated by a chairman, the entire proceedings are recorded and transcribed, and then edited, with the addition of references, bibliographies and biographies, and published both in hard copy and as a freely available pdf. Several meetings have already been held and published on genetics-related or genetics-focused topics, including on haemophilia (Tansey & Christie, 1999); rhesus factor (Zallen et al., 2004); genetic testing (Christie & Tansey, 2003); clinical genetics (Harper et al., 2010); clinical cancer genetics (polyposis and familial colorectal cancer) (Jones & Tansey, 2013); and clinical molecular genetics (Jones & Tansey, 2014). All publications can be downloaded from the Group's website at: www.histmodbiomed.org/article/wellcome-witnesses-volumes.