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Order at: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31687 "The Middle East plays a major role in the history of genetic science. Early in the twentieth century, technological breakthroughs in human genetics coincided with the birth of modern... more
Order at: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=31687

"The Middle East plays a major role in the history of genetic science. Early in the twentieth century, technological breakthroughs in human genetics coincided with the birth of modern Middle Eastern nation-states, who proclaimed that the region's ancient history—as a cradle of civilizations and crossroads of humankind—was preserved in the bones and blood of their citizens. Using letters and publications from the 1920s to the present, Elise Burton follows the field expeditions and hospital surveys that scrutinized the bodies of tribal nomads and religious minorities. These studies, geneticists claim, not only detect the living descendants of biblical civilizations but also reveal the deeper past of human evolution.

Genetic Crossroads is an unprecedented history of human genetics in the Middle East, from its roots in colonial anthropology and medicine to recent genome sequencing projects. It illuminates how scientists from Turkey to Yemen, Egypt to Iran, transformed genetic data into territorial claims and national origin myths. Burton shows why such nationalist appropriations of genetics are not local or temporary aberrations, but rather the enduring foundations of international scientific interest in Middle Eastern populations to this day."
The emergence of blood transfusion services after the First World War provided new venues for nationalist and racial research. This paper focuses on racial serology in the Turkish Republic during the period between the 1920s and the... more
The emergence of blood transfusion services after the First World War provided new venues for nationalist and racial research. This paper focuses on racial serology in the Turkish Republic during the period between the 1920s and the 1970s, with particular attention to the role of the Greek-Turkish population exchange and the political conflict over Cyprus. These events entailed mass movements of refugees and violence based on communal identities, which were racialized through serological studies. As the blood of recently displaced people circulated through Greek and Turkish blood banks, physicians used data about blood types to substantiate historical hypotheses about past mobility. Through these genetic reconstructions of historical population movements, they took sides in contemporary territorial disputes. Beginning in the 1950s, the transnational conflict over Cyprus gradually transformed Turkish scientists’ representation of Greek Orthodox communities’ blood group frequencies, portraying them as “racially Turkish” rather than as biological others.
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... more
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.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, population geneticists sought computational solutions to integrate greater numbers of genetic traits into their debates about the ancestral relationships of human groups. At the same time,... more
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, population geneticists sought computational solutions to integrate greater numbers of genetic traits into their debates about the ancestral relationships of human groups. At the same time, geneticists’ longstanding assumptions about Jewish communities, especially Ashkenazim, were challenged by a series of social, political, and intellectual developments. In Israel, the entrenched cultural and political dominance of Ashkenazi Jews faced major social upheaval. Meanwhile, to counteract lingering anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, Arthur Koestler’s The Thirteenth Tribe and Raphael Patai and Jennifer Patai Wing’s The Myth of the Jewish Race argued that Jewish identity was not connected to biological ancestry from the ancient Israelites. Drawing on scientific publications and archived correspondence, this article reconstructs a transnational social history showing how geneticists responded to these shifting claims about Ashkenazi identity and ancestry. Many argued that these claims could be tested using new statistical models, which provided allegedly more “objective” estimates of ancestral gene frequencies and histories of population admixture. However, they simultaneously engaged in heated debates over the relative superiority of competing statistical approaches. These debates reveal how the transnational reverberations of Israeli ethnic politics and Euro-American anti-Semitism affected the development of new calculations for genetic admixture, permanently shifting the assumptions of population genetic research on Jewish populations as well as other human groups.
The Pasteur Institute of Iran underwent a major expansion of its research productivity and international recognition during some of the most significant events of modern Iranian history: the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry,... more
The Pasteur Institute of Iran underwent a major expansion of its research productivity and international recognition during some of the most significant events of modern Iranian history: the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, followed by the Anglo-American coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. During this period, the institute’s French director, Marcel Baltazard, was embedded in a complex set of working relationships with his Iranian employees, research subjects, and government ministers; American scientists and foreign aid workers; and French Pasteurians and diplomats. Baltazard constantly described these relationships as instances of “collaboration.” The temporal and geographical context demands a critical reading of scientific collaboration alongside the negative implications of political collaboration. Investigating the political commitments and social attitudes of the French director and Iranian staff, this essay demonstrates that scientific collaboration at the institute both reinforced socioeconomic inequalities within Iran and mirrored global Cold War geopolitics that undermined Iranian sovereignty.
Roundtable featuring Projit Bihari Mukharji, University of Pennsylvania; Myrna Perez Sheldon, Ohio University; Elise K. Burton, Cambridge University; Sebastián Gil-Riaño, University of Pennsylvania; Terence Keel, University of California,... more
Roundtable featuring Projit Bihari Mukharji, University of Pennsylvania; Myrna Perez Sheldon, Ohio University; Elise K. Burton, Cambridge University; Sebastián Gil-Riaño, University of Pennsylvania; Terence Keel, University of California, Los Angeles; Emily Merchant, University of California, Davis; Wangui Muigai, Brandeis University; Ahmed Ragab, Harvard University; Suman Seth, Cornell University
Historical accounts of sickle cell disease tend to emphasize either its theoretical role in catalyzing the field of medical genetics or its clinical and social significance in representing the health-care disparities experienced by... more
Historical accounts of sickle cell disease tend to emphasize either its theoretical role in catalyzing the field of medical genetics or its clinical and social significance in representing the health-care disparities experienced by African Americans. This essay bridges these narratives by focusing on the discovery of sickle cells in marginalized Arabic-speaking communities of Yemen and Turkey in the 1950s. As in North America, sickle cell research in the Middle East unfolded along the social fractures of race. The essay analyzes how British, Turkish, and Arab geneticists attempted to create evolutionary hypotheses that reconciled historical and sociological boundaries between white and African, Arab and Turk. As the parameters of Turkish and Arab nationalism shifted in the Cold War–era Middle East, so did the favored explanatory narratives for the presence of sickle cells in different communities, which assigned different degrees of importance to African ancestry, socially enforced endogamy, and evolutionary adaptations to malaria.
View: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306312718804888 Abstract: Most Middle Eastern populations outside Israel have not been represented in Western-based international human genome sequencing efforts. In response,... more
View: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306312718804888

Abstract:
Most Middle Eastern populations outside Israel have not been represented in Western-based international human genome sequencing efforts. In response, national-level projects have emerged throughout the Middle East to decode the Arab, Turkish and Iranian genomes. The discourses surrounding the ‘national genome’ that shape scientists’ representation of their work to local and international audiences evoke three intersecting analytics of nationalism: methodological, postcolonial and diasporic. Methodologically, ongoing human genome projects in Turkey and Iran follow the population logics of other national and international genome projects, for example justifying research with reference to projected health benefits to their fellow citizens. Meanwhile, assumptions about and representations of ethnicity and diversity are deeply inflected by local histories of scientific development and nationalist politics. While Iranian geneticists have transformed this paradigm to catalog national genetic diversity through a discourse of ‘Iranian ethnicities’, Turkish geneticists remain politically constrained from acknowledging ethnic diversity and struggle to distance their work from racialized narratives of Turkish national identity. Such nationally-framed narratives of genomic diversity are not confined to their original contexts, but travel abroad, as demonstrated by a US-based genome project that articulates a form of Iranian-American diasporic nationalism.
Abstract: In the aftermath of World War II, a new international infrastructure based on United Nations agencies took charge of coordinating global biomedical research. Through this infrastructure, European and American geneticists hoped... more
Abstract: In the aftermath of World War II, a new international infrastructure based on United Nations agencies took charge of coordinating global biomedical research. Through this infrastructure, European and American geneticists hoped to collect and test blood samples from human populations all over the world to understand processes of human heredity and evolution and trace the historical migrations of different groups. They relied heavily on local scientific workers to help them identify and access populations of interest, although they did not always acknowledge the critical role non-Western collaborators played in their studies. Using scientific publications, personal correspondence, and oral histories, I investigate the collaborative relationships between Western scientists, their counterparts in the Middle East, and the human subjects of genetic research. I comparatively examine the experiences of Israeli and Iranian scientists and physicians engaged in genetic anthropology and medical genetics between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s, noting both how they applied nationalist historical narratives to their genetic data and how they struggled to establish the value of their local knowledge and scientific labor. I argue that the Israeli and Iranian experience of transnational scientific collaboration is representative of how Western scientists relegated their collaborators from “developing” regions to a subordinate positionality as collection agents or native informants. Meanwhile, within their own countries, the elite professional identity of Israeli and Iranian scientists granted them the authority to manipulate their research subjects, who often belonged to marginalized minority communities, and to interpret their biology and history within contexts of Jewish and Persian nationalism.

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Elise K. Burton, “Teaching evolution in Muslim states: Iran and Saudi Arabia compared.” Reports of the National Center for Science Education 30, no. 3 (2010), 28-32.
E. K. Burton, “Evolution and creationism in Middle Eastern education: a new perspective.” Evolution 65, no. 1 (2011), 301-304.
Workshop on “Sciences of Difference in South Asia,” University of Pennsylvania, 19-20 August 2019
History of Science Society Annual Meeting, Utrecht, Netherlands, 23-27 July 2019.
International Society for the Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Biology, Oslo, Norway, 7-12 July 2019
Workshop on “The Power of Medicine in the Middle East,” 11-12 April 2019, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany.
Workshop on “Race After the 1940s in Human Population Genetics and Physical Anthropology.” 24-25 January 2019, Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France.
Workshop on “Medical Mobilities in the Middle East and North Africa, 1830-1960,” 7-10 January 2019, Nazareth, Israel.
Near and Middle East History Seminar, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), London, 5 February 2018.
Global Health Seminar, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), 14 November 2017.
Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, 18-21 November 2017, Washington, DC
Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, 30 August-2 September 2017, Boston
25th International Congress of the History of Science and Technology, 23-29 July 2017, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Meeting of the International Society for the Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Biology, 16-21 July 2017, São Paulo, Brazil
Conference on “The Globalization of Science in the Middle East and North Africa, 18th-20th Centuries,” 24-25 March 2017, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA
History of Science Society Annual Meeting 2016
Middle Eastern Studies Association Annual Meeting 2016
Symposium on “The Molecularization of Identity: Science and Subjectivity in the 21st Century,” Harvard University Program on Science, Technology, and Society, April 29-30, 2016 Most Middle Eastern populations (outside Israel) have been... more
Symposium on “The Molecularization of Identity: Science and Subjectivity in the 21st Century,” Harvard University Program on Science, Technology, and Society, April 29-30, 2016

Most Middle Eastern populations (outside Israel) have been marginalized by Western-based international genomic sequencing efforts. Neglected by the HapMap Project, 1000 Genomes Project and the Human Genome Diversity Project, genetic data from the peoples of this region have often been treated by the international scientific community as instrumental to broader schemes (such as tracing the evolutionary origins of Europeans), rather than as populations of intrinsic genetic interest. In response to this neglect from the international scientific community, national-level genome projects have emerged throughout the Middle East to decode the Arab, Turkish, and Iranian genomes. These include several competing Arab Genome Projects financed by state and private funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (home of the Centre for Arab Genomic Studies); the Turkish Genome Project and the Anatolian Genetic History Project, both spearheaded by Turkish scientists in collaboration with Americans; and two separate Iranian Genome Projects, one based in Iran and the other among the Iranian-American diaspora. Emphasizing the Turkish and Iranian cases, I analyze the discourses deployed to encourage individual and communal participation in national genetic research and to explain the universal scientific value of these “national genomes” to international audiences. Highlighting both the subjectivity of Middle Eastern scientists and the populations they study, I examine how national scientific communities behave as mediators, acting simultaneously as “native informants” to Western-based global science and as local technocratic elites. Drawing on scientific publications and media coverage, I contextualize Middle Eastern national genome projects within the historical development of human genetics research in the region as well as contemporary geopolitical concerns.
Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting, 21-25 November 2014, Washington, DC
Institute of Turkish Studies Conference on Turkish Studies from an Interdisciplinary Perspective, 7 May 2014, Washington, DC Within critical science studies, the development of academic science in the 20th-century Middle East, in... more
Institute of Turkish Studies Conference on Turkish Studies from an Interdisciplinary Perspective, 7 May 2014, Washington, DC

Within critical science studies, the development of academic science in the 20th-century Middle East, in particular the field of human genetics, remains a largely neglected subject. The most advanced scholarship to date focuses on Israeli geneticists, whose work on Jewish populations has been shown to reflect their Zionist-framed working environment in various ways. Although the Israeli state’s convoluted relationship to “Jewish biology” is often treated as a unique or anomalous case, Turkish history offers striking parallels in both its institutional development of scientific research and its ideological needs as a nation-state. An analysis of the work of Turkish geneticists and their efforts to identify and characterize “Turks” in biological terms shows that studying the history of modern science in Turkey has much to contribute to debates about how ideological factors influence the practices of human genetics on both a regional and a global scale. To make this point, here a specific example of population delineation and labeling of the Nusayri Alawites of southern Turkey as “Eti-Turks” is traced through the international genetics literature between the 1950s and 1980s.
Conference Celebrating Ada Lovelace and Women in STEM Fields, 17-18 October 2013, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ
Annual Conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 22-27 March 2012, Boston, MA.
Eighth Conference of the Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 24-26 September 2010, Bergen, Norway.
Research Interests:
Elise K. Burton, “Living Monuments: Imagining Ancient Gene Pools in the Middle East,” History of Anthropology Newsletter 42 (2018): http://histanthro.org/notes/living-monuments/.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Genetics have emerged as a new scientific tool for studying human ancestry and historical migration. And as research into the history of genetics demonstrates, genetics and other bioscientific approaches to studying ancestry were also... more
Genetics have emerged as a new scientific tool for studying human ancestry and historical migration. And as research into the history of genetics demonstrates, genetics and other bioscientific approaches to studying ancestry were also integral to the transformation of the very national and racial categories through which ancestry has come to be described over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this podcast, we speak to Elise Burton about her research on the development of human genetics in the Middle East. Burton has studied the history of genetics within a comparative framework, examining the interrelated cases of human genetics research in Turkey, Israel, Iran, and elsewhere. In this episode, we focus in particular on the history of genetics in Turkey and its relationship to changing understandings of nation and race within the early Republic. In a bonus segment (see below), we also look under the hood of commercial genetic ancestry tests to understand present-day science within the context of these historical developments.
Research Interests:
From November 2019 to June 2020, Mary Brazelton, Elise Burton, Shireen Hamza and I co-convened an online working group hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Philadelphia. The group aimed to bring... more
From November 2019 to June 2020, Mary Brazelton, Elise Burton, Shireen Hamza and I co-convened an online working group hosted by the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine in Philadelphia. The group aimed to bring together historians of science working on Asia, broadly conceived to include not only East and South Asia but also West Asia (i.e. the Middle East), Central Asia and Siberia, and to discuss research in progress as well as pressing issues of methodology and pedagogy in our discipline. Our thematic focus this year was how our field can contribute to calls for decolonization in scholarship and teaching.
Our seven sessions included discussions on decolonization as method with respect to specific regions; decolonial methods in precolonial history of science; neotraditional sciences/medicines; religious scientisms; issues of scientific collaboration and power; and Asian histories of 'indigenous knowledge.' Each session includes a detailed reading list. The group webpage can be found at https://www.chstm.org/content/science-across-regions-asia
Research Interests: