Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics by Jenny Bangham (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics by Jenny Bangham Stephen Pemberton Jenny Bangham. Blood Relations: Transfusion and the Making of Human Genetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 328 pp. $40.00 (978-0-226-74003-4) Blood Relations is an extraordinarily perceptive study of the material and ideological relationships that constituted human genetics as a scientific discipline in the mid-twentieth century. The book is remarkable in numerous ways. Chief among them is Jenny Bangham’s nuanced use of historical evidence from Britain to explain how serological studies of blood groups facilitated the advancement of human genetics before, during, and after World War II. A great deal was at stake then, as it is now, in making human genetics an authoritative, trustworthy science. That said, the stakes were significantly different in the mid-twentieth century than they are today. Human genetics in the 1920s was a scientific field in its infancy. Geneticists viewed A, B, and O blood groups with keen interest in the interwar period because these newly discernable hereditary traits seemed wholly unaffected by environment. When large data sets for human blood groups became available with mass blood donation in Britain, geneticists could analyze them with their proven statistical methods and thereby map human genetic diversity at the population level. Historians of science and medicine will thus find in Blood Relations an exemplary study of human genetics that is tightly focused on explaining how the discipline’s epistemic authority was constituted out of a potent intermingling of British “blood, bodies, and bureaucracy” in the mid-twentieth century (pp. 4–5). As Bangham emphasizes, Britain was at the center of the world’s largest empire following World War I. While remaining highly influential, that empire was also in decline. By the time Nazi Germany made clear it posed an existential threat to this island nation, Britain was aggressively searching for “redemptive narratives of community and internationalism” (p. 5). Ironically, then, a foreign nation invested in racial hygiene and German superiority sent Britons en masse to donate blood for the survival of their own body politic. Blood Relations thereby explores how blood “transfers and exchanges” occasioned by a clash of ethnic nationalisms brought “the contours of nation, class, friendship, institution(s), and ethnicity” to bear on the making of human genetics (p. 14). Blood Relations also interprets transfusion medicine’s rise in the late 1930s and 1940s as the scientific and humanitarian opportunity it was in the minds of Britain’s leading geneticists. Bangham’s effective approach is, first, to describe intricately how the serologist’s “wet” laboratory practices were aligned with the “dry” practical paperwork of British state bureaucracy. The latter made transfusion networks robust enough to meet the health demands of a population at risk of annihilation during World War II. Bangham then explains how the large scale of genetic data produced by this wartime infrastructure evolved in the 1950s into a practical means for reforming the eugenic elements within British race science. Such reform was necessary after World War II for developing a humanitarian scientific and state apparatus capable of creating international networks devoted to understanding human genetic diversity at the population level. [End Page 464] If population data on blood groups became the preferred and effective means in Britain for elevating human genetics into a trustworthy science in the mid-twentieth century, then the book’s chief contribution lies in Bangham’s detailed presentation of this acculturated preference. In the 1950s, the trustworthiness of human genetics was rendered consonant with Allied visions of a post-WWII order that openly valorized democratic and humanitarian values. Yet, as Bangham successfully explains, the infrastructure of blood and bureaucracy that gave human genetics its earliest validity also reinforced “the racial ordering of people” (p. 209). Anthropology’s critical role in challenging the race-based science of human genetic diversity is also given its proper due. The book concludes with a thoughtful discussion of what this founding regime of human genetics entailed after DNA supplanted blood as the preferred standard of genetic know-how and governance. Bangham says, “genetics has overwhelmingly maintained its image as an unbiased methodology for detecting human diversity in medical and...