HISC 108 Long Essay Prompt

The purpose of this exercise is to help you to make up your own mind about a range
of issues that will only become more and more urgent in the years ahead. As biology
gets a more intricate and sophisticated understanding and control of the processes
of heredity, all the questions raised in a crude form by eugenicists in the early
twentieth century will return in an updated version. How will you respond? This
paper should give you the historical background necessary for an informed and
educated opinion.

The question you will answer is:

How were the major developments in the sciences of heredity and evolution
applied to human beings in the twentieth century? What can this tell us about
the relationship between science and society?

Your essay must also use at least eight of the class readings listed below. Here
are the citations for the class readings, for your convenience. You may cut and paste
from this list for your works cited page:

Charles B. Davenport, 1921, ‘Research in Eugenics,’ Science, 54:1400, pp. 391-397

Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 1910, ‘Sex Limited Inheritance in Drosophila’ , in Classic

Papers in Genetics, ed. James A. Peters, Prentice Hall, Inc., 1959, pp. 63-66.

Sturtevant, A. H., and Dobzhansky, T., (1936) ‘Inversions in the Third Chromosome
of Wild Races of Drosophila Pseudoobscura, and their use in the study of the History
of the Species.’ Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, 22: 448-450

Dobzhansky, Theodosius, 1962, Mankind Evolving, New Haven: Yale University

Press, pp. 253-271, 284-286.

UNESCO, 1952, The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry, Paris: UNESCO, pp. 98-103;
5-16

James Watson and Francis Crick, 1953, Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids in Classic
Papers in Genetics, ed. James A. Peters, Prentice Hall, Inc., 1959, 241-243.

Francis Crick, 1970, Letter to Bernard Davis, April Crick Archive, Special Collections,
Geisel Library, UCSD.

Herman Muller et al., 1939, The Geneticists’ Manifesto, Journal of Heredity, 1939, pp.
371-74

Herman Muller, 1973, ‘What Genetic Course Will Man Steer?’ Man’s Future
Birthright, New York: SUNY Press, pp. 117-152
Michael Dodson and Robert Williamson, 1999, “Indigenous Peoples and the morality
of the Human Genome Diversity Project” Journal of Medical Ethics, 25:204-208

Emma Kowal, 2013, ‘Orphan DNA: Indigenous Samples, Ethical Biovalue, and
Postcolonial Science,’ Social Studies of Science 43 (4): 577-597

Genographic project, ethics statement

Academic Integrity:

You are expected to write your papers by yourself, using your own words and ideas or
otherwise attributing them to the writer from whom you borrowed. For class readings,
name, date, page number citations are sufficient, e.g. (Muller, 1973, p. 6). You may cut
and paste the reference list above for your works cited list. For outside sources, please
use a standard citation technique, and if in doubt, use APA method, the rules of which
are to be found on TED. You may cite my lecture notes thus: (Gere, lecture 2).

Any copying or paraphrasing of another’s words or ideas without citation is

plagiarism and a violation of the UCSD standards of academic integrity. Any
violations will be reported to the Academic Integrity Office.