From Radiation Effects to Consanguineous Marriages: American Geneticists and Colonial Science in the Atomic Age

Abstract

In 1947, the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) established the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), funded by the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and sent American scientists to Hiroshima and Nagasaki to investigate the late effects of radiation exposure among atomic bomb survivors. James Neel, medical professor at the University of Michigan, headed the genetics team of the ABCC, whose mission was to assess possible genetic mutations caused by radiation. After the termination of the ABCC genetic studies in 1954, Neel and his colleague, William Schull, embarked on another project in Japan: the genetics of consanguinity—marriage among close relatives—in Japan. The radiation and consanguinity studies were ostensibly separate projects. Yet they used overlapping subjects and resources and helped establish Neel’s prominent position in human genetics in the postwar period. This article investigates why studies of inbreeding in Japan became a scientifically significant subject for Neel and other American geneticists of the postwar period. Their special attention to this breeding pattern, based on the data obtained from people residing in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki regions (not necessarily atomic bomb victims), reflected American fears of rising mutations among humans in a changing, “dystopian” world. These fears reflected anxieties that were the product of heightened radiation levels from nuclear weapons, an “exploding” global population, and the further mixing of different population groups as America expanded its empire. The data obtained in Japan helped scientists understand the types and number of genetic diseases that existed in different population groups. The data also helped them to estimate how much mutation human populations could manifest. Furthermore, Neel