Our next
Resident Scholar lecture will be happening on Friday, August 5 at 2:00 p.m.
in the Willamette West room on the
Valley Library’s third floor. Our speaker this time is Dr. Michael
Kenny, professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Kenny
has been working with the Pauling Papers in developing his talk, “‘Fear of the
Mutant: Recessive Genes and Racial Degeneration in the Nuclear Fallout Debate.” An
abstract of this presentation is below. We hope to see you there.
By the
1950s geneticists had come to partially understand the role that recessive
genes play in certain hereditary disorders, some of which were obvious (such as
sickle cell anemia), and others presumably concealed within morbidity and mortality
statistics. These possible latent effects were very much on the minds of those — such as Hermann Muller, Linus Pauling and George Beadle — who were critical of
atmospheric nuclear testing. Their concern was a latter-day expression of what
had been a long-standing obsession of the eugenics movement: the fear of
cumulative racial degeneration and decline. This presentation examines how
these ideas were articulated in the context of the nuclear fallout debate.