Abstract
The historiography on the concept of race in the post-war sciences has focused predominantly on the UNESCO campaign against scientific racism and on the Anglo-American research community. By way of contrast, this article highlights the history of the concept of race from a thus far unexplored angle: from Swiss research centres and their global interconnections with racial researchers around the world. The article investigates how the acceptance, resonance, and prestige of racial research changed during the post-war years. It analyses what resources could be mobilised that enabled researchers to carry out and continue scientific studies in the field of racial research or even to expand them and link them to new contexts. From this perspective, the article looks at the dynamics, openness, and contingency of the European post-war period, which was less stable, anti-racist, and spiritually renewed than retrospective success stories often suggest. The pronounced internationality of Swiss racial science and its close entanglement with the booming field of human genetics in the early 1950s point to the ambiguities of the period’s political and scientific development. I argue that the impact of post-war anti-racism on science was more limited than is frequently assumed: it did not drain the market for racial knowledge on a continent that clung to imperialism and was still shaped by racist violence. Only from the mid 1950s onwards did a series of unforeseen events and contingent shifts curtail the importance of the race concept in various sectors of the human sciences.
The years during and after the Second World War are generally deemed the decisive phase when attitudes towards racial research and the concept of race changed within the sciences. Most studies concur that the mass crimes of the National Socialists during the Second World War, which demonstrated to the world the devastating consequences of radically implementing racial doctrines, effected a reversal of opinion (Barkan, 1992; Kühl, 2013; Proctor, 1988; Stepan, 1982). This view maintains that the criticism of racial theories and concepts first voiced by a minority of anti-racist anthropologists and geneticists during the interwar period gained traction after 1945 and became the dominant opinion among scientists. In this respect, studies often mark the end point of this decline of the race concept with the UNESCO statements on race of 1950 and 1951, which bundled together criticisms of racial doctrines and were intended to undermine the scientific basis for racial discrimination.
In the last 20 years, however, this narrative of decline has been challenged on numerous occasions. Various investigations have pointed out surprising continuities of racial ideas and concepts in the post-war period, not only in physical anthropology (Pogliano, 2005) and medicine (Wailoo, 2001, 2011; Wailoo and Pemberton, 2006) but also in genetics. In their illuminating studies on genetic variation research, Lisa Gannett (2001), Jenny Reardon (2004), and Veronika Lipphardt (2010, 2012, 2014) vigorously argue against a one-sided narrative of decline. These studies show that although renowned geneticists and anthropologists encouraged the transformation of racial research into population genetics, this transformation was neither complete nor marked by a clear break. While they, too, emphasise the importance of the UNESCO campaign, they do so precisely to demonstrate how the post-war sciences did not abandon the concept of race but, rather, revised it.
The UNESCO campaign on race thus takes centre stage in the recent as well as the older historiography on post-war science. Accordingly, a great deal has been written on the origins of the UNESCO campaign, and on the negotiations that led to the frequently cited statements on race of the early 1950s (Bangham, 2015; Brattain, 2007; Gormley, 2009; Müller-Wille, 2007; Reardon, 2004). Moreover, as most studies focus on the Anglo-American world, particular attention is paid to those famous American and English scientists who were involved in the UNESCO debates. By comparison, rather little is known about how the UNESCO campaign and other anti-racist efforts were received or ignored in various national and local contexts. 1 Furthermore, the activities of racial scientists in continental Europe and their efforts to revive research after 1945 are rarely explored. 2 In focusing on leading Swiss research centres, this article aims to look beyond UNESCO and the Anglo-American research community. It examines how various kinds of racial research were conducted after 1945, and how the transnational activities of racial scientists interacted with the rapidly changing political contexts in post-war Europe. From such an angle, it is possible to shed light on manifestations and trajectories of racial science in the post-war era that so far have been paid little attention.
Studies that challenge the aforementioned narrative of decline have especially emphasised the persistence of the concept of race and the astounding resilience of racial categories, interpretations, and narratives. Thus Lipphardt (2014: 51) speaks of a ‘longue durée history’ of human variation research that consistently retained the concept of race as an important interpretive instrument. From this perspective, certain interpretive patterns and classification practices appear to have been so firmly embedded in the knowledge systems of Western societies that they survived the fundamental political upheavals of the 20th century.
Such a portrayal is convincing in many respects. Consider, for example, how the 18th-century classification of humanity into three or four major groups associated with skin colour has persisted down to the present day (Müller-Wille, 2014). My contribution, too, emphasises continuities in racial research. It suggests, however, a shift in focus, as I do not so much refer to the durability of categories and narratives as follow a ‘short durée’ perspective that brings into view the contingencies, rapid changes, and shifting political constellations of the post-war period.
More than almost any other phase in European history, the post-war years were historiographically transfigured by a retrospective determinism, which in this case viewed all developments after 1945 such that they logically flowed into a European success story about political stability, social well-being, and intellectual renewal. As aptly formulated by the historian Tony Judt (2005: 236), ‘The difficult post-war years [were portrayed] in the flattering light of the prosperous decades to come’. Such retrospective whitewashing also features in accounts of the history of racism, which tend to interpret the immediate post-war period in light of anti-racism’s later successes.
But the years after 1945 in Europe by no means witnessed the triumph of a new anti-racism that rang in an era of ethnic tolerance under the banner of ‘unity in diversity’. Instead, as Keith Lowe vividly describes in his book Savage Continent (2012), these years were marked by racial violence and expulsions. Moreover, the various forms of persecution were accompanied by continued efforts to categorise and separate ethnic groups (Lowe, 2012: 187–8). The new network of international organisations committed to an egalitarian universalism did not yet guarantee a stable order. Rather, many contemporaries considered the supranational endeavours of these institutions to be just as futile as the well-intentioned attempts after the First World War to secure permanent peace through international treaties and agreements (Judt, 2005: 242). Against this backdrop, the impact generated by international campaigns such as those of UNESCO against scientific racism should not be overestimated. Nor was the end of colonialism looming in European perceptions of the post-war period. In the years after 1945, most European colonial experts shared the conviction that Africa would remain permanently under colonial rule (Jansen and Osterhammel, 2017: 4). Colonial readings and patterns of behaviour therefore continued to hold sway. There was accordingly little chance of racial concepts losing their political significance in the period 1945 to 1953. During these years, it was impossible to foresee what role racial categories and demarcations might play in the future in the political sphere.
This applied equally to the scientific sphere, which was intertwined with the political. The period after 1945 is commonly associated with the rise of a new science of human heredity, namely, human genetics, which—according to the general view—developed distinctly from the definitively discredited field of racial research. To emphasise the idea of a fresh start, textbook narratives often reduce post-war genetics to breakthroughs in cytogenetics and molecular genetics that facilitated the study of human heredity on the level of chromosomes and genes, respectively. Such a retrospective reading conceals the fact that human cytogenetics remained an insignificant field on the margins of human genetics until the mid 1950s, and that human molecular genetics began to flourish only in the late 1960s (Comfort, 2012; de Chadarevian, 2020; Lindee, 2005). Moreover, recent studies of the history of human genetics have shown that the post-1945 research field was far wider and heterogeneous than is suggested by such a restricted view (Bangham and de Chadarevian, 2014; Gausemeier, Müller-Wille, and Ramsden, 2013; Thomaschke, 2014). Around 1950, it was by no means clear what directions would be taken in the development of the science of heredity, or what role racial concepts would play therein.
Following Tony Judt (2005), a number of historians have warned against interpreting the post-war years merely as a prelude to later developments. This would obscure ‘the radical contestation’, ‘openness’ (Stone, 2012: 11), and ‘messier contingencies’ (Eley, 2012: 37) that characterised these years. Such teleological traps should also be avoided with regard to the history of the post-war sciences. This article thus aims to exploit these insights from general history for the purpose of the history of science by paying attention to the indeterminacy, eventfulness, and dynamics of the post-war period.
In the following, I pursue the question of how the acceptance, resonance, and prestige of racial research changed after 1945. 3 What resources could be mobilised that would enable researchers to carry out and continue scientific studies in the field of racial research, or even to broaden their scope and link them to new contexts? Switzerland presents an interesting case study in this regard, because it brings to light transnational and global relationships that thus far have been little explored. For a long time, the ‘small neutral state’ that had no colonies and largely escaped the devastation of the world wars was considered particularly well suited for research into eugenically relevant questions of heredity and race in a seemingly purely scientific manner and independently of the expansionary superpowers’ interests. Against this backdrop, the international community of racial scientists found research centres such as Zurich and Geneva highly appealing. Conversely, Swiss racial studies relied on the global demand for racial knowledge and depended on cooperative arrangements that crossed both disciplinary and national boundaries.
Such relationships of exchange and forms of collaboration were not necessarily based on ideological or scientific consensus. As Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer (1989) have argued in a well-known essay, cooperative endeavours do not require shared viewpoints. Rather, standardised methods enable the collaboration of agents whose opinions may diverge, both politically and scientifically; and the vague and open-ended nature of concepts such as that of race did frequently facilitate collaboration between different research fields and between the sciences and politics. The following seeks to elucidate two forms of transboundary cooperation that enabled and empowered racial research. These are, first, the transnational cooperation that emerged on the basis of the exchange of methods, concepts, and instruments, and, second, the interdisciplinary cooperation that forged links between racial science and human genetics.
Exporting standardised packages: The Anthropological Institute in Zurich and the global dimension of Swiss racial science, before and after 1945
During the first half of the 20th century, racial anthropological research in Switzerland had a strong international focus. This applied to both of Switzerland’s centres for physical anthropology. The Department of Anthropology in Geneva carried out investigations on behalf of the hygiene commission of the League of Nations (Niceforo and Pittard, 1926) and cultivated close relationships with Southern European countries. Thus its director Eugène Pittard, who was personally acquainted with Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish state, advanced to become an important supporter of a modern Turkish racial anthropology sanctioned by state ideology (Ergin, 2017; Kieser, 2007). 4 The second centre for physical anthropology, the Anthropological Institute in Zurich, exerted even greater international appeal, which I will discuss in the following.
Until mid-century, the Anthropological Institute in Zurich was dominated by two figures. The first was Rudolf Martin, for whom Switzerland’s first professorial chair in anthropology was established in Zurich in 1899 (Germann, 2015b; Morris-Reich, 2013). The second was his student and successor Otto Schlaginhaufen, who directed the institute from 1912 to 1949 (Germann, 2016; Keller, 1995). The concept of race formed a central medium that in numerous ways linked the small Zurich institute to global discourses and politics of colonial rule and to researchers throughout the entire world. First, used as a heuristic search tool, the concept of race guided the institute’s own research; second, as a global interpretive scheme, the concept facilitated communication and exchange with scientists around the world. For anthropology in Zurich, the concept of race assumed such a central role that Martin (1914: 2) also referred to his discipline as the ‘somatology of the human races’.
The main focus of the institute in Zurich was on a practical endeavour that made the institute famous, namely, the development and standardisation of anthropometric body measurement techniques. The measurement techniques, observation forms, and instruments developed in Zurich rose to become leading export items. They were used worldwide to undertake racial classifications and clarify racial affiliations. Between 1929 and 1935 alone, racial researchers from the United States, South Africa, New Zealand, Canada, Germany, England, Poland, India, China, Hong Kong, Holland, Spain, Hungary, and Estonia visited the Zurich institute for training in measurement techniques or to exchange ideas with Zurich anthropologists. 5 From East Asia to South America, racial researchers were guided by methods developed in Zurich and used instruments manufactured by a Zurich firm that collaborated with the Anthropological Institute. In the first half of the 20th century, Zurich anthropology exercised more influence on anthropological measurement techniques than any other school of anthropology.
Produced in Zurich and exported throughout the world, the instrument sets, observation forms, and precise body measurement instructions can be described as standardised packages. Joan Fujimura (1992) uses this term to designate a powerful tool for scientific collaboration that provides a bundle of not only standardised technologies but also concepts or theories. Standardised packages enable cooperation and interactions between actors of various social worlds with heterogeneous interests, but limit the space of possible representations and practices such that a certain stabilisation of knowledge can be ensured. Accordingly, the measurement programmes of Zurich anthropology were flexible enough to allow their application in manifold political, social, and epistemic contexts. Inherent to these programmes were conceptual assumptions about the ‘nature’ of racial differences. Thus the observation forms stipulated the selection of those bodily features that signified racial affiliation (this included, for example, body size, facial angles, and hair type, but not girth). The measurement programmes thereby predefined a narrow framework for the process, which the social anthropologist Peter Wade (2002: 4) called the social construction of racial phenotypes. Thus the standardised packages developed in Zurich provided a globally applicable construction kit for the metric identification of racial differences.
The success of these packages was based in large part on a location advantage enjoyed by Zurich anthropology in Switzerland. Whereas important proponents of racial research in the United States and England—but also in many continental European countries—increasingly faced the criticism that their research was distorted by national prejudices and corrupted by claims to superiority and power (Barkan, 1992; Schaffer, 2008; Weindling, 2006), racial research in Switzerland—a country without colonies or imperial ambitions—was rarely viewed as ideologically suspect. The reputation of Zurich anthropology as a purely scientific school, independent of imperial powers and apolitical, substantially contributed to its international appeal.
However, Zurich anthropology was far from apolitical. As I have shown in detail elsewhere (Germann, 2015b), the Zurich anthropologists used territories under colonial rule as testing grounds to trial and further develop their measurement methods and instruments. Thus the standardised packages of Zurich anthropology took shape within the epistemic space of European imperialism. Conversely, researchers in colonial contexts were among the most important recipients of the measurement forms, instructions, and instruments developed in Zurich. In Europe, in turn, the demand for Zurich anthropology’s standardised packages grew in the 1930s, as racial research gained greater state attention and funding on a continent increasingly dominated by fascism. To be sure, the Zurich institute also cultivated friendly contacts with scientists who opposed National Socialism, but its relationships with researchers and institutes in Nazi Germany were especially close. Zurich even readily supplied research-related instruments, publications, and information to SS anthropologists involved in scientific crimes in German concentration camps (Germann, 2016: 143–50).
To sum up thus far: the Zurich institute’s global appeal depended largely on the political demand for racial knowledge in an imperially expanded Europe. Against this background, the question arises of how the seismic political shift of 1945 changed the transnational relationships of Zurich racial research. Indeed, surviving correspondences show how the downfall of the Nazi empire narrowed the opportunities of Zurich racial researchers for cooperation because important contacts in German institutes fell away or lost their importance. 6 However, we should not let these developments conceal the surprisingly international orientation of Schlaginhaufen’s network after 1945, illustrated by numerous inquiries by letter in the late 1940s. An institute in Montevideo in Uruguay, for example, expressed interest in future research collaborations; a student of the American anthropologist Wilton Krogman intended to pursue his doctorate in Zurich; and the director of an anthropological institute in Delhi inquired about opportunities for his students to make research visits to the Anthropological Institute in Zurich. 7 In addition, numerous European colleagues wanted to build on close pre-war relationships or sought support from the Swiss anthropologists to establish new institutes, continue research that had been interrupted by the war, or launch new research projects. In the years from 1947 to 1949 alone, Schlaginhaufen conducted correspondence with scientists from France, Germany, Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, England, Holland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, South Africa, India, China, Venezuela, Uruguay, Brazil, and the United States. 8 Moreover, anthropologists throughout the entire world continued to buy their measurement instruments in Zurich. The standardised packages of Zurich anthropology were obviously in high demand even during the post-war years.
How can we explain these international relationships of the Zurich institute after 1945? One plausible reason lies simply in the fact that racial researchers and eugenicists revived their pre-war networks. But this does not suffice as an explanation, especially since after the war—as will be shown in the next section—a new generation of scientists engaged in racial research as well. Rather, the specific political contexts and expectations of the post-war period also played a role, as illustrated by the following two examples.
The Polish anthropologist Jan Czekanowski cultivated close relationships with the Anthropological Institute in Zurich throughout his entire career. As a former doctoral student of Rudolf Martin and frequent guest at Zurich, he always applied the standardised packages of Zurich anthropology but developed his own evaluation procedure for analysing racial distributions. Czekanowski became known primarily for his extensive research in Rwanda (Czekanowski, 1911–27). But starting in the 1930s, the anthropologist increasingly conducted research on Europe. He thereby found himself in severe conflict with German racial research because his racial investigations also carried a political message: they were intended to delegitimise German claims of superiority and expansionist intentions with regard to Poland (Geisenhainer and Mischek, 2002). His central thesis was that neither the territory of the German empire nor the German-language region featured a greater proportion of the ‘Nordic race’ in comparison to surrounding areas. After 1945, he still sought to prove this thesis with a tremendous research effort. Playing a decisive role in this endeavour was Swiss research material obtained by Otto Schlaginhaufen during his many years of survey work in the Swiss military, which he now made available to his Polish colleague. In 1954, Czekanowski (1954: 232) triumphantly announced that the evaluation of the Swiss material had yielded a ‘sensational surprise’. It showed that the Swiss population was more characteristically ‘Nordic’ than the population of Germany. According to Czekanowski, this proved the error of German racial research and fundamentally revised previously held assumptions about Central Europe’s racial composition (ibid.: 291).
In retrospect, one might evaluate Czekanowski’s zeal as the obsession of an anthropologist who seems to have been stuck in the Europe of the 1930s. But such a retrospective judgment falls short. The Polish anthropologist was not alone in continuing to have his expectations shaped by the decisive fault lines of the World War era. Even around 1950, many Europeans were more frightened by ostensible desires for revenge on the part of a reinvigorated Germany than by an escalation of the East/West conflict. Moreover, in many European states, civil wars and ethnic homogenisation projects carried on with great brutality for years after the war’s official end (Lowe, 2012; Ther, 2014: 143–208). Ethnic and racial classification criteria still decided the lives and futures of many people in Europe. Against this background, the question of Europe’s racial composition continued to be explosive and politically contested territory, and in this respect racial researchers could also hope that their research would resonate. Even after the war, Schlaginhaufen expressed very optimistic sentiments with regard to the future prospects of European racial research. In 1947, when Harold N. Arrowsmith, an American amateur anthropologist and wealthy sponsor of racial studies, worriedly inquired whether racial research was still possible in Europe, Schlaginhaufen seemed astonished by the question. ‘Opportunities to work in the area of racial studies’, responded the Swiss anthropologist, ‘still exist in every country’. 9
This brings me to my second example. Visions of racial order and racial classification practices also remained influential during the post-war period in many colonial and post-colonial contexts. This can be seen especially clearly in South Africa, which paradoxically developed towards the apartheid state at the same time that an Allied victory over the Nazi racial empire became imminent. Against this background, racial-biological discourses elicited a widespread response in 1940s South Africa (Dubow, 1995). This was precisely the time when Otto Schlaginhaufen was solidifying and expanding his relationships with South African researchers. In 1948, he contributed a publication to a South African scientific journal, and he increasingly exchanged ideas with South African anthropologists, supporting them in their purchase of Zurich measurement instruments. In addition, Schlaginhaufen’s metric survey of military conscripts in Switzerland served as a model for racial anthropological research projects in South Africa. 10 As shown by the example of South Africa, not all political shifts of the 1940s were adverse to racial research. Also taking shape were political orders that provided new application fields and justifications for racial research.
Overall, we can conclude that racial research in the years after 1945 continued to find a broad resonance. This was also true for Switzerland. Around mid-century, for example, popular magazines still reported euphorically about Swiss anthropologists who were conducting body measurements and racial classification studies in ‘foreign’ countries (Purtschert, 2013). The imperial illusions still entertained in Europe after 1945 created a sounding board in Swiss media for concepts, images, and practices derived from the reservoir of colonial discourse.
Racial research could also still count on broad support at Swiss universities. This was shown quite clearly as Otto Schlaginhaufen approached retirement in 1949, when, as part of cost-saving efforts, Zurich’s cantonal government raised the question of whether or not to fill the soon-to-be vacant chair in anthropology. 11 This triggered a pronounced reaction on the part of the Zurich professoriate. The drosophila geneticist Ernst Hadorn—doubtless one of the most influential figures in Swiss research policy of the post-war period—immediately formulated a statement that unequivocally spoke out in favour of continuing racial anthropology at the University of Zurich. 12 Subsequently, Switzerland’s most renowned geneticist managed to secure the unanimous support of the university’s entire medical and science faculty for his statement. Directed to the canton government, the letter proved to be successful. No further mention was made of eliminating the professorial chair.
The statement adopted by the members of the two faculties testifies to the renown of Zurich racial anthropology. According to the statement, the Anthropological Institute had ‘an outstanding international reputation’ and the measurement methods developed at the institute were ‘being used today in the entire world’. The elimination of the chair would therefore ‘appear to the international scientific community as an incomprehensible termination of a distinguished university tradition’. This shows once again how a distinctive internationality constituted an essential resource with which Swiss racial scientists gained acceptance and prestige. But the statement of the Zurich faculty members also pointed towards yet another important basis for the legitimacy of racial research, noting that racial anthropology dealt with the ‘inheritance of normal physical and psychological traits’ and thus was majorly important for the emergent discipline of human genetics. This area still required ‘unforeseeable research work’, which forms the subject of the next section.
The alliance of human genetics and racial anthropology: Blood group research in the post-war years, 1945–54
In historical accounts, the research fields of human genetics and racial research are usually kept neatly apart. Narratives about human genetics relate how the discipline was created after the Second World War and rapidly rose to become a leading field of science. In contrast, the traditional account of racial research tells of the decline of an ideologically guided pseudoscience that was resolutely rejected by no later than 1945. Such a clear distinction, however, has been convincingly criticised as an ex post construction that fails to capture the historically reconstructible interrelations between actors and institutions, methods and concepts (Germann, 2016; Lipphardt, 2012; Massin, 1999). Racial research and human genetics have a shared, entangled history. This is especially clear in the field of blood group research.
ABO blood groups have proved to have important methodological advantages over anthropological features. They form easily definable Mendelian units that remain unchanged throughout a person’s lifetime and whose inheritability was confirmed in the mid 1920s. Blood groups have therefore since been regarded as ideal genetic markers. As fittingly stated by Pauline M. H. Mazumdar (1996: 624), they were considered to be ‘nature untouched by nurture’. No other biological feature shaped early human genetic research as strongly as human blood groups. At the same time, blood group research also provided new impulses for racial research: investigations of the geographical distribution of blood groups appeared to finally deliver on the promise of putting racial anthropological research on a solid genetic basis.
Historical studies have judged blood group research in strikingly different ways. Whereas some view it as nothing less than a culmination of ideologically motivated racial research (Weingart, Kroll, and Bayertz, 1992: 358), others attribute to blood group research an important role in overcoming racial assumptions and prejudices (Harper, 2008: 215). These opposing interpretations depend in the first instance on the national context under discussion. While German blood group research can be linked to National Socialism’s völkisch blood mysticism and the German tradition of racial anthropology, English blood group research, which as of the Second World War took on a leading international role, seems to stand for the departure of modern human genetics and the transition from racial research to human population genetics. However, these two research traditions are less clear cut than this opposition suggests, and cannot be so plainly separated. Historical studies on German blood group research show how the research field was politically and scientifically divided between Jewish serologists and völkisch-oriented researcher, who both, however, strived to attribute blood groups to races (Boaz, 2012; Geisenhainer, 2002; Mazumdar, 1990; Spörri, 2013). Meanwhile, Jenny Bangham (2014) has convincingly revealed how blood group research in Great Britain did not simply overcome traditions of racial science, as its scientific projects drew on, and also cemented, pre-existing racial knowledge of human populations. Moreover, Bangham (2013: 75) points to connections between the German and the English research tradition, a transnational dimension that has not yet been subject to much scrutiny. Blood group projects carried out in Switzerland are particularly interesting in this regard, for they demonstrate how much these research traditions could be merged.
Whereas in most European countries blood group research already flourished in the 1930s (Schneider, 1995), its development in Switzerland began only in 1940, after which, however, it underwent a spectacular upswing. During the first decade following the war’s end, in relation to the number of inhabitants, Switzerland featured more investigations into the geographical distribution of blood groups than any other country. 13 The Swiss blood group studies were strongly shaped by an interest in racial anthropological findings and at the same time viewed as a prestige project in the new discipline of human genetics. For example, a major project was launched by the Commission for Human Heredity (Kommission für die Erbbiologie des Menschen), founded in 1943 as the first human genetics association in Switzerland. For this purpose, it created an interdisciplinary Work Group for Blood Group Research, where, for example, the drosophila geneticist Hadorn worked together with the racial anthropologist Schlaginhaufen, who was a long-standing member of the völkisch-oriented German Association for Blood Group Research (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Blutgruppenforschung). The work group pursued the ambitious goal of determining the geographical distribution of the ‘blood group genes’ of the entire Swiss population by using the blood group data of over 270,000 Swiss soldiers who were mobilised during the war (Germann, 2013).
In Switzerland—as also in other countries—the surge in blood group research was essentially linked to the establishment of a medical and military blood donation service. Since the mid 1930s, medical and technological advances facilitated the setting up of large-scale blood depots, which now were considered relevant for war purposes (Schneider, 2003: 207–16). In the Second World War and more so in the Cold War, the military, policymakers, and the Swiss Red Cross therefore pursued the ambitious goal of establishing a blood donation service intended to ensure permanent war readiness. In this context, racial anthropologists and human geneticists were able to work together with the army and Red Cross to obtain access to the resources of the blood donation service (Germann, 2015a). The preventative military efforts during the Second World War and early Cold War therefore helped lend new impulses to racial research.
After the war, blood group research dedicated special attention to the German-speaking Walser minority, residing mainly in small villages in south-east Switzerland. Initial assessments of the blood group data of Swiss soldiers had revealed that an extremely high proportion of the Walser population had blood group O (Schütz, 1946: 225). These results fuelled racial anthropological speculations, and the Walser settlements consequently became a preferred field of investigation for a genetically oriented racial research.
Starting in 1953, a newly established work group pursued an especially ambitious project financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), which was founded in 1952 and since then has been Switzerland’s most important research funding institution. The goal was to determine the ABO blood groups and rhesus factors in all Walser settlements, genealogically determine the kinship of all inhabitants, and anthropometrically survey all residents. Also to be determined were genetic markers such as PTC tasting and tongue rolling (Huser, Moor-Jankowski, and Rosin, 1956). This entanglement of new genetic and old anthropometric and genealogical methods was quite typical for human variation research in the post-war era. In particular, the traditional practices of body measurement proved astonishingly persistent and adjustable to new contexts, although they had been criticised since the beginning of the century (Lipphardt, 2014; Little, 2012). As many projects on human variation in the post-war decades, the SNSF funded Walser investigation did not dismiss the old approaches of racial anthropology but combine them with determinations of blood groups and genetic markers.
While Swiss blood group studies of the 1940s had still been strongly aligned with German blood group research, this prestige project of the SNSF now sought a close exchange with the now leading Anglo-American research community. Thus project members travelled to the United States and England, where they exchanged ideas with human geneticists such as Alexander S. Wiener, William Boyd, Lionel Penrose, and Arthur E. Mourant. 14 The work group then also received new population genetic approaches from the United States and became interested, for example, in the extent to which factors like genetic drift or selection influenced the genetic composition of the Walser populations. But at the centre of the project was the research proposition that the striking blood group distribution in Walser areas was due to a racial affinity on the part of the German-speaking minority. Members of the work group accordingly not only contextualised their Walser project in the broader contexts of genetics and anthropology but described it explicitly as a contribution to racial research. 15
In the course of the project, the concept of race remained unclear and vague. As per the application to the SNSF, the project’s main question was whether the Walser population should be grasped as a ‘racial entity’. 16 Yet at the same time, it specified the racial groups that allegedly composed the Walser people. While on the one hand the research group used a dynamic racial concept from population genetics, on the other hand it still referred to typical categories of traditional anthropology, such as the ‘Nordic’, ‘Alpine’, and ‘Mediterranean’ races. Within the project, race served as a flexible search term that enabled questions regarding affiliations and connections between various different fields of knowledge. Precisely this flexibility of the race concept (Schmuhl, 2003) made it possible to mobilise various actors, disciplines, interests, and approaches for the same project. The project’s methodological approaches then also ranged from the traditional practices of racial anthropology such as the measurement of bodies to modern laboratory methods and mathematically elaborated evaluation procedures like those developed in population genetics. The Walser investigations exemplify how in the early 1950s human variation research was characterised by remarkable openness and indeterminacy.
Befitting this openness was also the pronounced heterogeneity of the scientists involved in the project. 17 First, the heterogeneous composition of the work group attests to how the project was based on the close cooperation between physical anthropology, human genetics, statistics, and serology. Participating as human geneticists were the director of the Geneva eye clinic, Adolphe Franceschetti, who significantly propelled the institutionalisation of human genetics at the University of Geneva, the two junior scientists Jan Moor-Jankowski and Hans-Jürg Huser, and the geneticist Siegfried Rosin, today considered a pioneer of population genetics in Switzerland. Together with Arthur Linder, professor for mathematical statistics at the University of Geneva, Rosin brought statistical and mathematical expertise to the project. Physical anthropology was represented by the director of the anthropological institute in Geneva, Marc-Rudolphe Sauter, his colleague Hélène Kaufmann, and Karl Hägler, a former student of Schlaginhaufen. Since his appointment in 1947, Sauter had completely focused the Geneva institute on racial research and his 1952 monograph Les races de l’Europe established him as an expert on European races (Sauter, 1952). The work group was ultimately able to recruit Alfred Hässig as a blood group serologist, who in the post-war period had emerged as one of the most important exponents of the Swiss blood donation service. The laboratories of the blood donation service of the Swiss Red Cross provided crucial support for the Walser project, not only providing the equipment needed for blood sampling but also conducting the determination of the blood groups and blood factors. In the publications of the blood donation service, Hässig (1953: 17) proudly pointed out accordingly that blood group serology was also making a forward-looking contribution ‘in the area of racial research’.
Second, the project did not just bring together older scientists who had already been established before the war. Rather, the figures driving the Walser project were exceptionally young. When the project was launched, Sauter and Rosin were not even 40 years old, Hässig was just over 30, and the two highly dedicated medical scientists, Moor-Jankowski and Huser, had not even reached the age of 30. This contradicts the thesis that continuities of racial research after 1945 were due simply to the lack of a change of generations.
Third, the Walser investigations brought together persons with diametrically opposed biographical experiences and political convictions. This is seen most clearly with regard to Jan Moor-Jankowski and Wilhelm Knoll, who, as a pioneer of the Walser serological research, likewise participated in the project. Before 1945, Knoll held a professorship for sports medicine in Hamburg; he was also a member of the NSDAP and the SS, and as a Swiss citizen living in Germany, he spoke out unequivocally in favour of National Socialism in Swiss newspapers (Uhlmann, 2005). In contrast, Jan Moor-Jankowski, who grew up in Poland, was a resolute opponent of National Socialism, joining the Polish resistance during the Second World War and participating in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. After being severely wounded and interned first in German concentration camps and later in Soviet prisons, Moor-Jankowski managed to escape to Switzerland, where he studied medicine at the universities of Fribourg, Lausanne, and Bern. 18
By no means did collaboration within this heterogeneous research group prove to be conflict-free. Fierce disputes over areas of authority, for example, erupted between Knoll and Moor-Jankowski, who increasingly played a leading role in the Walser investigations. 19 In addition, the research process was characterised by dynamics that repeatedly changed and expanded the work objectives. A 1956 internal report of the SNSF stated, for example, that the ongoing Walser investigation always resulted in ‘ever new unexpected prospects’, meaning primarily an orientation towards problems of medicine and population genetics, while questions of race tended to become less important. 20
But such developments could certainly not be foreseen when the project began. In 1954, when Moor-Jankowski and Huser reported on the large-scale Walser project to the annual assembly of the Swiss Society for Genetics, they started their exposition with a definition of the concept of race: ‘Viewed genetically, racial differences can be defined as differences in genetic stock’. From this perspective, they continued, it was necessary to ‘investigate the genetic compositions of human groups and then compare them with each other’ (Huser and Moor-Jankowski, 1954: 298). Moreover, the two promising junior geneticists clarified that they were interested not so much in the Walsers specifically but rather in a more comprehensive goal. The attempt to ‘grasp the racial element [Rassenmässige] of the Walsers’ (ibid.: 300) was intended to serve as an exemplary approach for developing a form of racial research based on human genetics. Moor-Jankowski later also established with satisfaction that the work methods they developed in the Walser project had already been deployed in investigations in Austria, Hungary, France, and Spain. 21
The Walser investigations provide a striking example of how racial concepts and classification practices also exercised astounding powers of persuasion and appeal in the post-war era. They proved to be open to the approaches of population genetics and likewise realised old visions of racial research. Although interdisciplinary collaboration was often supported in racial research programmes, rarely was it so comprehensively put into practice. In many respects, these findings fall in line with the results of recent studies on post-war human variation research, which show that anthropologists and geneticists continued to use old racial classifications and narratives and that their orientation towards population genetics accordingly did not entail a rejection but rather a reformulation of racial concepts. There is, however, a salient distinction: in comparison to leading geneticists and anthropologists in the Anglo-American research community, scientists in Switzerland regarded their studies on human variation much more as a continuation of European racial research of the first half of the century. In this regard, it is telling how Swiss anthropologists responded to the UNESCO campaign against scientific racism.
As is well known, a group of scientists within UNESCO published a statement on the race concept in 1950, with the aim of reaching an international consensus on ending scientific racism. After this statement had faced severe criticism, it was revised, and in 1951 a new statement was published that was less radical and more agnostic towards major research questions of racial science, for example regarding the supposed harmfulness of miscegenation (Müller-Wille, 2007). In the hope of winning broad approval for this revised statement, UNESCO invited 96 scientists to comment on it, among them the aforementioned Swiss anthropologists (UNESCO, 1952). While the two older anthropologists, Schlaginhaufen and Pittard, refused to comment, Marc-Rodolphe Sauter (1952) added some comments on both statements to his book Les races de l’Europe. In the introduction, he confirmed his rebuttal of the first UNESCO statement. Claiming that it merely expressed the view of some American sociologists who presumed to call themselves anthropologists, he questioned the statement’s (natural) scientific basis as well as its international character. In accordance with other physical anthropologists, he most notably criticised three propositions in the statement: first, to drop the term race and replace it with ethnic groups; second, to view race as a social myth rather than a biological phenomenon; and, third, to argue that there was no proof of differences in the mental capacities of various human groups. In sum, his critique culminated in the rebuke that this statement denied ‘la réalité raciale’ (ibid.: 15). Shortly before the book went to print, he added a footnote, saying how gratified he was that natural scientists had revised the UNESCO statement. For Sauter, the second statement just confirmed the view of most racial researchers, namely that racial groups did not coincide with national or religious groups. Therefore, he approved the revised statement and regarded it as ‘tout à fait acceptable’ (ibid.: 15, n. 1). The second statement, he claimed, accorded with his own viewpoint in his book.
This is remarkable, as Sauter’s book clearly stands in the tradition of European racial research of the first half of the 20th century. Sauter acknowledged the efforts of racial science to divide the European population into distinct races and, while ignoring major critical accounts of European racial research, did not shy away from referring extensively to leading racial researchers of Nazi Germany or the anti-Semitic anthropologist George Montandon, the latter a ‘racial examiner’ of the Vichy Regime, who had been directly involved in enforcement of the ‘Final Solution’ in France (Krassnitzer, 2007). 22 By comparing the different classification systems, Sauter came to the conclusion that there was much more consensus among anthropologists on how to classify the European population as races than had been assumed. In a chapter on the so-called ‘Jewish Question’, Sauter rebutted the notion of a Jewish race but claimed—in accordance with Montandon and other leading racial theorists of the Vichy Regime—that a ‘Jewish type’ existed, thus presumably confirming that anthropological differences between Jewish and non-Jewish populations could be found. In sum, Sauter’s book aimed not to revise older views on race but rather to lend them more scientific credibility and, hence, acceptability. Obviously, Sauter’s viewpoint was contrary to the moral and political aims of the UNESCO campaign.
The research institutions in Switzerland exemplify that, in some contexts, the UNESCO campaign had very limited impact. In Switzerland, the UNESCO statements met with neither enthusiastic approval nor fierce disapproval. Rather, the reaction of the Swiss anthropologists, who regarded themselves as representatives of an apolitical, neutral science, was shaped by a remarkable indifference. In their view, the anti-racist activities of some American academics had little to do with their European tradition of racial research. During the UNESCO debate of the early 1950s, racial research was a booming field in Switzerland. As the example of the Walser investigations shows, this boom rested in particular on an especially close connection between human genetics and racial research in the first decade after the war. Thus, in Switzerland—during the very period commonly held to be that of a definitive decline in racial research—the alliance between racial research and human genetics actually reached its heyday.
Global events and scientific transformations, 1955–60
But this peak stage of racial research lasted only briefly. As of the mid 1950s, a change began to set in that would increasingly dissolve the connection between human genetics and racial anthropology. We can observe this trend, for example, in the Journal de Génétique Humaine, founded in Geneva in 1952 as the first human genetics journal in the French-speaking world. Whereas in its early years the journal regularly published studies in the field of racial research, by the end of the 1950s it contained hardly any articles dealing explicitly with racial issues. Similar developments can also be found in other fields of medicine and science—for instance, in publications of the Swiss blood donation service that were aimed at a broad public audience. While until the mid 1950s these publications highlighted the importance of blood group serology for racial research, after this point such references began to disappear.
Finally, we also find people turning away from racial research in the course of their scientific careers. In particular, medical doctors, who in the early 1950s still distinguished themselves in the field of racial research aligned with human genetics, turned increasingly to other subjects and issues. Jan Moor-Jankowski, for example, maintained his interest in blood groups but became more and more interested in immunological research, from the late 1950s using primates as models. In 1965, he received a position at New York University and established the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates, serving as its director until 1995 (Pincock, 2005). Moor-Jankowski received numerous honours and accolades as an internationally renowned pioneer in medical primatology and also as former resistance fighter against Nazi Germany, but his engagement in Swiss Walser research, which aroused his interest in blood group serology in the first place, has been forgotten.
Not everyone, however, abandoned racial research. Astounding continuities persisted within Swiss anthropology. As late as 1979, the Geneva professor Marc-Rudolphe Sauter published a Racial History of the Swiss (Sauter, 1979), and until the late 1970s the Anthropological Institute of the University of Zurich offered a lecture entitled ‘Racial Studies of Man’ (Keller, 2006: 65). But we should not allow these continuities to conceal the changing conditions of reception. Although anthropological racial research was still highly regarded at Swiss universities and by the public until the mid 1950s, its scientific prestige and public presence evaporated during the next decade. In 1960, when the University of Zurich once again filled its chair for anthropology, Marc-Rudolphe Sauter was considered an ill-suited candidate because, among other reasons—as an advisory assessment maintained—he had ‘dealt exclusively with racial science’. 23 This stands in striking contrast to the immediate post-war period, when a profile in racial science was explicitly desired for the anthropological chairs at both at the University of Geneva and the University of Zurich.
These examples all point to the fact that the years from 1955 to 1960 constituted an important transformative phase during which racial research lost scientific significance and public relevance. As I have shown in detail elsewhere (Germann, 2013), dynamics within blood group research contributed partly to this change. The combined effect of contradictory empirical findings, the testing of new methods, and shifting research interests, for example, made racial interpretations of the Walser population less persuasive by the end of the 1950s. In this section, I deal with the broader context in which such shifts occurred. Of central importance were three global events and developments that narrowed the relevance and acceptance of racial research in the second decade after the war.
First, one should refer to the European unification process, which favoured discourses highlighting commonalities instead of differences within Europe. Categories such as the Nordic, Mediterranean, and Alpine races, which had been used by racial researchers since the 19th century to categorise the European population, still remained widespread around mid-century; it is striking that the 1951 revised UNESCO statement on the concept of race by no means called this traditional racial categorisation of Europe into question (UNESCO, 1952). In the foreword of his book Les races de l’Europe, however, Marc-Rodolphe Sauter (1952) already mentioned the political discussions regarding Europe, now focused less on Europe’s heterogeneity than its unity. Indeed, the more that the process of European unification took on shape, generated confidence in stability, and bridged older lines of conflict, the more European racial divisions that had preoccupied generations of racial researchers lost their political relevance and scientific acceptance. During the second decade after the war, designations such as the Nordic, Alpine, or Mediterranean race largely disappeared from scientific discourse. By the end of the 1950s, even Otto Schlaginhaufen (1959)—who had worked with this racial classification system for his entire research career—had stopped using these categories.
Second, as of the mid 1950s—particularly with the Suez crisis of 1956—the end of European colonialism became imminent. The accelerating process of decolonisation, which now lurched into the perceptual horizon of Europeans, increasingly dissolved one of the most important contexts for the legitimacy and application of racial research. This international development also impacted European countries that did not possess any colonies (Purtschert and Fischer-Tiné, 2015). As neutral ‘free-riders’ (Tanner, 2015: 63), Swiss racial researchers had been involved in scientific colonialism insofar as they worked closely together with colonial authorities during research projects, participated in colonial scientific expeditions, and used the European empires as sales markets for the standardised packages that they developed in Switzerland. The crises of colonialism since the First World War had already partly worsened the research conditions in colonial contexts (Germann, 2015b). But the approaching demise of the colonial empires in Asia and Africa now fundamentally transformed the general political conditions for Swiss racial research. Switzerland now increasingly pursued the foreign policy goal of developing good bilateral relations with the newly created states without thereby affronting the colonial powers. Thus, as early as 1954, federal officials advised Swiss citizens in Africa to carefully distance themselves from the colonialists (Zürcher, 2009: 279–80). Since the early 1960s, Switzerland, whose international prestige had suffered because of its non-membership in the United Nations and its morally questionable conduct during the Second World War, began establishing a reputation for its development aid, presenting itself in the process as a small neutral state unencumbered by any colonial past (ibid.: 280–2). This new self-conception of Switzerland, supported by a broad political consensus, conflicted with the colonial overtones imparted by images of Swiss racial anthropologists measuring and classifying people in foreign lands. The period of accelerating decolonisation also worsened conditions for the reception and acceptance of racial research in Switzerland.
A third crucial development was triggered by the American nuclear tests in the Bikini Atoll, which, starting in 1954, precipitated a global debate about the damaging health effects of ionising radiation (Walker, 2000; Weart, 2012). These debates led for the first time to a new awareness of the dangers of radiation in the atomic age. For geneticists, this discourse about the dangers of radiation provided new opportunities for public distinction and research funding (Creager and Santesmases, 2006). To be sure, the debates often tied into eugenic discourses, but concerns for a population’s gene pool no longer referred—as in traditional eugenics—to the reproductive behaviour of certain social groups or races. Instead, the ‘increased mutation risk’, as prognosticated for the ‘atomic age’ by Ernst Hadorn (1962: 11), for example, shifted the focus to the ‘endangerment’ of human life as a whole. Establishing itself against this background was a genetic discourse about dangers and preventions based not so much on fragmentations of the population but rather on the idea of an endangered humanity.
The increased attention paid to ionising radiation since 1954 also heavily influenced human genetic research. Investigations into radiation-damaged chromosomes being newly conducted in the now intensively funded field of radiation research contributed decisively to the breath-taking rise of human cytogenetics (de Chadarevian, 2013), which very rapidly metamorphosed from a neglected subdiscipline to the groundbreaking core of human genetic research (Harper, 2006; Lindee, 2005). Just two years after the atom bomb tests on the Bikini Atoll, scientists for the first time correctly determined the number of human chromosomes, and by early 1959, a group of French cytogeneticists managed for the first time to link a disorder—what became known as trisomy 21—to an altered number of chromosomes. This breakthrough in chromosome research ushered in a new era of human genetics, which now evolved into a more specialised discipline aligned with medicine. New forms of interdisciplinary cooperation were now required. Whereas during the first post-war decade the geneticist Ernst Hadorn had largely supported the collaboration between human geneticists and racial anthropologists, in 1959 he created a cytogenetic research association that now consisted of experimental geneticists and clinicians. 24 The work of this productive research association delivered the decisive impulse for the institutionalisation of human genetics at the University of Zurich. When a department for human genetics was founded in 1963, the director’s position was assigned to Werner Schmid, a radiation geneticist educated in the United States. Zurich human genetics now focused almost exclusively on chromosome research, whereas racial issues no longer played any role whatsoever.
Conclusion
Historiography on the concept of race in the post-war sciences has attached great weight to the UNESCO campaign against scientific racism and accordingly emphasised the importance of an invigorated anti-racism in the aftermath of the horrors of World War II. By way of contrast, the history of Swiss research centres and their global interconnections points to the limitations of the UNESCO campaign and of post-war anti-racism in general. This history not only sheds light on the specific national context of a country that was neither occupied by Nazi Germany nor directly involved in the war, but also reveals transnational and global relationships. The sustained internationalism of Swiss racial science, which is to say, its dependency on transnational cooperation as well as on the global demand for racial knowledge, highlights the ambiguities and contingencies of the period’s political and scientific development. The post-war period did not simply constitute an era of scientific humanism that found expression in the universal science of genetics and the rejection of scientific racism. Nor was it an era in which an international order homogenously committed itself to new egalitarian ideas and a prosperous, peaceful Europe, that is, an era in which the ideological concepts of difference predominant in the previous catastrophic period simply ceased to play a role. Rather, it was an era that underwent a rapid succession of events, unforeseen developments, and major shifts in expectations of the future.
Around 1950, the scientific future of racial concepts was essentially uncharted territory. In retrospect, the first post-war decade appears as a transitional phase during which racial research gave way to population genetics. But a more precise look at Swiss research projects shows how population genetics’ approaches were frequently intertwined with the methods, concepts, and interpretations of traditional racial research. In any case, the thriving field of blood group research created new opportunities for cooperation between anthropology, medicine, and genetics; and precisely because of its vagueness, the concept of race proved in this respect to be well suited to bringing together heterogeneous actors, scientific fields, and research interests in prestigious interdisciplinary cooperative efforts. The future of racial concepts also remained in limbo due to the uncertainty and ambivalence of political developments. The downfall of the Nazi regime narrowed the scope for the reception of racial research. But in a politically contested Europe, ethnic and racial delineations retained their political explosiveness, and the European adherence to imperial illusions continued to provide fertile soil for discourses that emphasised racial differences and hierarchies. The political market for racial knowledge did not evaporate during the post-war years, and studies on racial questions accordingly still met with broad interest. Against this backdrop, even after 1945, there were manifold transnational collaborations through which racial research garnered attention and prestige.
A change did occur, however, in the mid 1950s. Racial concepts lost their significance within imported new fields of human genetics, and racial research increasingly lost its authority. As studies on medical genetics (Germann, 2017; Wailoo and Pemberton, 2006) and population genetics (Gannett, 2001; Lipphardt, 2010, 2012, 2014; Reardon, 2004) have shown, this did not result in the complete disappearance of racial categories and ideas from genetics. But important racial classifications and interpretations that had shaped research for decades forfeited both their scientific robustness and their political relevance. In particular, European racial categories such as ‘Nordic’ and ‘Alpine’ largely lost their scientific acceptance within just a few short years. Thus one can conclude that racial categories do not always prove to be persistent but sometimes can also rapidly lose their significance and persuasiveness.
As scholarship on race in the post-war sciences has focused on the UNESCO campaign and its protagonists, studies usually emphasise the impact of post-war anti-racism on science, even if they argue against the traditional narrative that has claimed a decline in the race concept. Such a perspective brings into view the shift in accepted attitudes towards racial questions that occurred between the outbreak of the Second World War and the UNESCO statements of 1950 and 1951. By contrast, this article recommends that the continuity between the ‘long 1940s’ and the interwar period be more strongly emphasised, and the latter half of the 1950s instead be regarded as the essential transformative phase. Such a periodisation would be consistent with new historical narratives of the European post-war period. For instance, Tony Judt’s (2005) well-received proposal was to regard the years from 1945 to 1953 as a distinct phase that essentially maintained continuity with the 1920s before being superseded by an epoch marked by prosperity and new expectations as well as by disappointed illusions (Eley, 2008). The case study presented here indicates that an analogous periodisation might be compelling for the history of racial research in Europe. Such an interpretation not only involves a chronological shift but also challenges the rather optimistic view of the broad influence of scientific anti-racism, which can be traced back to a classic essay by the geneticist William B. Provine (1973). Provine took the transformation of scientific opinions on racial questions as an example of how ‘social and political factors’ had positively influenced science. Decisive for this change were not new empirical results but rather ‘the revulsion of educated people in the United States and England to Nazi racial doctrines and their use in justifying the extermination of Jews’ (ibid.: 796). In contrast, this article has shown how no less ‘educated’ people in continental Europe were not prepared to abandon their scientific convictions, not because they were more immune to ‘social and political factors’ but rather because it was not so clear, in the post-war years, exactly what direction these ‘factors’ would take on a continent that not only had been freed from Nazi Germany but also still clung to imperialism and remained shaken by racist violence. In any case, for many scientists, the crimes of National Socialism were not reason enough to abandon powerful racial interpretations and classifications of the European population, even though these had strengthened dividing lines in Europe, legitimated violence against minorities, and nourished nations’ expansionist projects. It was only thanks to a series of unforeseen events and contingent developments in the 1950s, and the ensuing changes in expectations, patterns of demand, and research agendas, that previously dominant racial ideas and concepts lost their importance.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
