The essays in this special issue shed new light on the transnational movement and exchange of researchers, data, theories, and scientific objects in the anthropological and genetic study of human populations in the twentieth century. Historians have long stressed how the study of race and human populations in this period served to create a national identity for emerging nation states. More recently, historical narratives of anthropology and human genetics have emphasized the global scale of research networks in these sciences. This (...) issue explores the specific routes, crossings, and interactions between national and international contexts prompted by the study of races and populations. The essays reveal not only how... (shrink)

This paper examines two moments in the globalization of human genetics, focusing on the American University of Beirut as a site of interaction between American, European and Middle Eastern scientific actors and research subjects. In the interwar period, the establishment of clinical laboratories at AUB's medical school enabled the development of an informal large-scale programme to study human heredity through anthropometry and sero-anthropology. AUB's Middle Eastern students were trained in these techniques, and research results were disseminated locally in Arabic as (...) well as in international scientific journals. In the post-war period, new technologies transformed human genetics into an internationally coordinated science with specialized laboratories. However, an attempt to establish such a lab at AUB during the 1960s ended in failure: the Anthropological Blood Grouping Laboratory functioned for only four years before closing. The American and British personalities who promoted the ABGL in Lebanon aimed to collect blood samples from across the region without committing to long-term relationships with local scientists and research subjects. As an ‘outpost’ for Western scientists, the ABGL embodied the neo-colonial structure of post-war human population genetics, both in its unfulfilled aspirations to serve metropolitan research agendas and in its marginalization of Middle Eastern scientists. (shrink)