Jenny Bangham

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Ph.D.

Residence: October 1, 2012 - September 30, 2013

Profile

Jenny studies the construction of blood groups as objects of genetic research in the mid-twentieth century, especially the ways in which they were shared and represented by workers in different settings. By the mid-1950s, blood groups were studied and used by anthropologists, doctors, transfusion workers, and clinical pathologists, but they were also the only human traits whose inheritance could be expressed in Mendelian terms. They were made into the cornerstone of a quantitative and objective approach to understanding the genetics of human disease.

The flourishing of blood group research happened at precisely the time that human geneticists were establishing their own journals, conferences and textbooks. Jenny explores how blood groups helped to consolidate the discipline of human genetics. She argues that they were not simply co-opted by researchers studying human genetics but simultaneously fashioned this emerging discipline, by mediating the circulation and calibration of scientific knowledge between different domains.

This project also contributes to a growing literature on the epistemic and practical functions of routine tools in science. One way in which blood groups took material form was as inscriptions, so following nomenclatures is helping to recover the ways in which the meanings of blood groups were negotiated. From this work a forthcoming paper in the British Journal for the History of Science offers a sustained analysis of the functions of nomenclatures in blood group research and genetics more generally.

Broader issues relating to the administrative tools of human heredity research were discussed at the workshop ‘Making Human Heredity: Populations and Public Health in the Postwar Era’, organised by Jenny and Soraya de Chadarevian. Held at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in Cambridge, and funded by the Wellcome Trust and Genetics Society, the workshop considered how methods of collecting and cataloguing data shaped the postwar study of human heredity. Jenny is co-editing these papers for a Special Issue of Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.