| Prof. Jenny Reardon (University of California, Santa Cruz) |

How did proponents of theories of racial hygiene under the National Socialist regime
in Germany come to serve as experts who drafted and commented on the UNESCO
Statements on Race? For nearly seventy-five years, these Statements have served as
paradigmatic reference points for scholars and activists who have sought to argue
that the concept of race has no meaningful basis in biology, and that all are human,
deserving of fundamental rights. What sense can be made of this troubling puzzle
that lies at the heart of their drafting? The answer, I argue, lies in unraveling how
during the early years of the Cold War, scientists, political leaders and bureaucrats
forged an understanding of ‘science’ as a moral force of ‘truth’ that could undergird
liberal democracies and oppose ideologies of racism and Communism. This talk
documents how Cold War constructions of science and science policy worked to
rehabilitate the moral status of geneticists and physical anthropologists who
supported the eugenics and sterilization policies of the National Socialist regime, but
who after WWII opposed Lysenkoist theories of genetics propagated by the Soviet
Communist Party. I conclude by considering how this episode can help shed light on
the current moment in which many once again attempt to mobilize ‘science’ as an
anti-racist, anti-authoritarian force. How far have liberal democracies moved from a
Cold War politics of science and truth that fosters racism even as it claims to be antiracist?

Jenny Reardon is Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Science and
Justice Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research
draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often
silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic
research. Her training spans molecular biology, the history of biology, science
studies, feminist and critical race studies. She is the author of Race to the Finish:
Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton University Press, 2005)
and The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, Knowledge After the Genome
(Chicago University Press, 2017).

The lecture will take place in cooperation with the Critical Genomics Network.

2.5.2024, 4:15 p.m., 1.G 107 PEG, Campus Westend