Author Archives: Robert Resta

by | February 15, 2023 · 1:47 PM

The American Society of Human Genetics Struggles to Face Its Past

Robert Resta and Diane B. Paul

Robert Resta is a retired genetic counselor and a regular contributor to The DNA Exchange. Diane B. Paul is Professor Emerita at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Associate in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. She has published widely on historical and policy issues in genetics. Her books include Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (1995), The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (1998), The PKU Paradox (with Jeffrey P. Brosco, MD, 2013), and an edited volume (with John Stenhouse and Hamish G. Spencer), Eugenics at the Edges of Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa (2018).

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) recently released Facing Our History – Building An Equitable Future Initiative, a report on the role of the organization and geneticists more generally in past injustices, including eugenics, sickle cell screening, and perpetuating inaccurate information about XYY syndrome and racial stereotypes about intelligence. About 3 years ago one of us (RR) authored a three-part series in this space that explored the role of eugenics in shaping the ASHG and the views of its leadership (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Some of that content was cited in the ASHG report.

There is much to be admired in ASHG’s willingness to acknowledge the roles the organization and its leadership played in respect both to eugenics and social injustice generally. However, the report also has several flaws. Here we focus our critique on our areas of interest and expertise – its account of the history of eugenics, which includes assertions that have been widely challenged by historians (without any acknowledgment of their contested status) as well as factual errors and omissions that skew interpretations. Here we discuss a few examples.

The Claim that Revelations of Nazi Atrocities Ended Support for Eugenics

In the summary of report themes (p. 4), the authors write that “after World War II and the realization of how American eugenic policies inspired the atrocities of Nazi Germany, public popularity of eugenics collapsed.” This claim is repeated in the section on “Origins of the American Eugenics Movement,” where readers are told that: “As the public learned how scientists and politicians in Nazi Germany used eugenic ideals to justify the atrocities and genocide they committed during the Holocaust, the public and scientific community became increasingly critical of and horrified by eugenics” (p. 10). But scholars have become increasingly skeptical of the view that World War II (WWII) represents such a turning-point. One source of skepticism is the fact that the trajectory of eugenic sterilization (which continued both in law and practice after WWII) does not even begin to square with this periodization. Another is the fact that many prominent scientists, such as Francis Crick, Linus Pauling, H.J. Muller, Julian Huxley, N.W. Pirie, and Peter Medawar (among others), and such influential theologians as Joseph Fletcher and Paul Ramsay, continued to argue for the need to control human reproduction – often explicitly under the rubric of eugenics — through at least the 1970s. Indeed, at conferences and in scientific and popular books and articles it was commonly argued that the need to control reproduction was now more urgent than in the past given expanded military and medical uses of radiation, resulting in an increasing “mutational load,” and advances in medicine that allowed individuals who would once have died before their childbearing years to survive and reproduce. The vocabulary of eugenics may have changed after WWII, but eugenics continued to play a key role in the writings and beliefs of many leading geneticists and other scholars.

Moreover, whether one thinks that eugenics (eventually) died or has continued in other guises depends crucially on how the term is understood. And understandings of what counts as eugenics have both shifted over time and remain contested. Thus, individuals who would have been considered – and considered themselves – to be critics of eugenics in the pre-WWII period, such as Lancelot Hogben and H.J. Muller, (because they criticized some of the scientific assumptions and/or racial and class biases that characterized establishment eugenics), would, by most current understandings of the term, count as eugenicists (because, among other things, they endorsed the sterilization of those with serious hereditary defects, a position that was then widely taken for granted, even by most self-defined critics). 

Moreover, there is no consensus today as to what policies, practices, and beliefs should be considered “eugenic.” In one perspective, eugenics implies state control of reproduction, whereas in another, eugenics can be voluntary and even actively chosen by individuals influenced by social norms of health, intelligence, and physical attractiveness. From the latter standpoint, far from withering and dying, eugenics continued to flourish in other forms such as marriage counseling, population control, and the once common cost-savings rationale for prenatal testing (preventing the birth of individuals with disabilities), in the 1960s and ‘70s. (Until the 1980s, most studies of the effectiveness of genetic counseling measured its impact on the incidence of disability and/or the reproductive decisions of counselees). Moreover, in the perspective of those who believe that eugenics can be private, voluntary, non-racist, and scientifically up to date, it may also inform such current reproductive genetics practices as prenatal and preimplantation genetic testing. 

That is not to assert that  a broad definition of eugenics that encompasses these policies and practices is correct, only that to claim that eugenics was killed by revelations of Nazi atrocities is to implicitly take sides in what is in fact an intense and ongoing debate.

Claims about Eugenicists’ Beliefs

The report’s authors define eugenics as a belief that undesirable traits “could be eliminated from the population” through selective breeding. Such a definition puzzlingly excludes all “positive” policies and practices, which ranged from free love to the Nazi “Lebensborn” program. Moreover, few if any eugenicists after about 1920 thought that traits could be eliminated from populations. Edward M. East was the first to realize that most deleterious genes would be hidden in apparently normal carriers, who would not be touched by programs of segregation and sterilization. That insight was made much more precise after acceptance of the Hardy-Weinberg theorem, which allowed geneticists to calculate the effects of selection against those affected. Thus, eugenicists understood that traits like “feeblemindedness” could never be eliminated from the population, and that even reducing their incidence would be a slower process than they had once hoped (though they considered that project worthwhile).

Particularly puzzling is the inclusion of abortion in a list of policies meant to restrict breeding by the unfit (p.6). The claim that American eugenicists promoted abortion in the service of ridding the world of undesirables is now commonplace on right-wing antiabortion websites, blogs, and magazines and was central to Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in the 2019 case of Kristina Box, Indiana v Planned Parenthood. Thomas’s claim that eugenics and abortion were linked from the start was denounced by a raft of historians, who know that, for multiple reasons, prominent American eugenicists had almost nothing to say about abortion and that what they did say was generally highly critical. Thus, according to the Eugenics Catechism issued by the American Eugenics Society in 1926: “Abortion is murder and no eugenist advocates it except to save the life of the mother.” Interviewed by the Washington Post, historian and lawyer Paul Lombardo said: “I’ve been studying this stuff for 40 years, and I’ve never been able to find a leader of the eugenics movement that came out and said they supported abortion.” Why the ASHG would want to give credence to this influential but discredited claim is a mystery.

The Characterization of H.J. Muller

The most egregiously distorted commentary concerns H.J. Muller, who is presented simply as a critic of eugenics. According to the authors of the report: “While some ASHG presidents embraced eugenic ideals and practices, others were critical of eugenics based on its reliance on racism and coercive practices. In 1932, H.J. Muller (ASHG President, 1948), criticized the eugenics movement during the Third International Eugenics Congress, stating that it was ‘the naïve doctrine that the economically dominant classes, races, and individuals are genetically superior.’ In the preface to the first issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, Muller continued to criticize eugenics for its purpose of ‘translating biological prejudice into action,’ by promoting classist and racist ideals that have no basis in genetics.” This is true as far as it goes but is also markedly one-sided and misleading. 

Throughout his life, Muller was a passionate advocate of the need to control human evolution. His sympathetic biographer, Elof Carlson, notes that eugenics was “the leitmotif of Muller’s life.” Muller was also, especially in the 1920s and ‘30s, a critic of some aspects of eugenics under capitalism. But it is worth noting that even in his famous 1932 critique, The Dominance of Economics over Eugenics, from which the report quotes, Muller wrote: “That imbeciles should be sterilized is of course unquestionable.” And indeed, as noted earlier, at that time few if any scientists would have dissented from that comment. 

Perhaps the best-known American proponent of “Bolshevik” eugenics, Muller held that only in a society not stratified into classes – as he believed was true of the Soviet Union and hoped would eventually be true of the United States – could the effects of nature and nurture be separated, and a truly efficacious eugenics program implemented. In 1925, he authored a eugenic manifesto, Out of the Night (finally published in 1935), in which he proposed a program for the mass insemination of women with sperm of men superior in intellect and character, a program that he argued would rapidly raise the level of the whole population. Emigrating to the Soviet Union in 1934, he tried and failed spectacularly to interest Josef Stalin in his proposal and ended up fleeing the country. But in the 1960s, he resurrected a version of that proposal — now called “germinal choice” — to emphasize its voluntary character. His 1949 presidential address to the newly-founded ASHG, titled Our Load of Mutations, argued that an ever-increasing load of deleterious mutations would ultimately destroy the human race as we know it. To counter this degeneration, Muller outlined a scheme where the most burdened 3% of population would voluntarily refrain from reproducing. Thus, Muller’s views illustrate the difficulty of dividing individuals into two mutually-exclusive groups, eugenicists and their critics. Muller was both, as were many of his scientific colleagues.

Why Did It Take So Long?

The report itself makes no new significant contributions to the history of eugenics. The role of ASHG and its leadership in eugenics has been well documented for over 30 years. Why has it taken so long for ASHG to acknowledge this history? One could argue that the time was now ripe for such a reckoning – after all, social justice occupies a large space in the current public dialogue. But that does not explain why the ASHG’s involvement in eugenics has largely been ignored until now. It’s not like the published history was obscure or written in abstruse scholarly lingo. Much of the work in the field is highly readable and readily available through search engines and on library’s shelves. It’s a pity that the ASHG report does not address the question of why it took the organization so long to officially acknowledge this history.

Our critique of the ASHG report is not simply a matter of correcting minor historical details. Although the society is to be commended for making an effort to come to grips with its past, much of its eugenics narrative is dated and simplistic. Without a more complete and nuanced understanding of this history, ASHG cannot truly face its past.

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by | January 26, 2023 · 6:25 PM

Left, Right, Left, Right: Pedigree Standards March Into The Future (And Start To Leave Behind The Male Gaze)

Ka mua ka muri (Walk backwards into the future with your eyes fixed on the past) – Maori whakatauki (proverb)

The NSGC Pedigree Standardization Task Force, of which I am a member, recently published updated guidelines for pedigrees, with a focus on sex and gender inclusivity.* Essentially, the guidelines state that the symbolic representation of individuals in a pedigree should be based on self-identified gender rather than sex assigned at birth. Squares, circles, and diamonds for people who identify as men, women, and non-binary people, respectively, supplemented by clarifying annotation when appropriate. A subtle implication of gender-focused pedigrees is that the internal logic of pedigree construction is no longer compatible with exclusively placing the “man’s family on the left and the woman’s family on the right” (to use the gendered language of yesteryear; more gender neutral but more awkward sounding terms might be sperm provider and egg provider). This point was illustrated in the article’s accompanying tables but not specifically called out in the text, though it is the subject of a brief follow-up Commentary. Of course, the discretion of which side of the pedigree to use for which side of the family is up to the individual counselor’s preference. It may take some getting used to, especially for those of us who have been drawing pedigrees for a very long time (“Oh no, how am I ever going to spot x-linked inheritance?”). But it’s a freeing choice rather than a restrictive mandate.

The reasons behind abandoning the long standing left/right tradition is straight forward. If pedigrees are based on gender, there are more than 2 genders, so a pedigree cannot logically and consistently be divided into halves. For example, if you are working with a couple in which one member was assigned male at birth but identifies as a woman and the other assigned female at birth but identifies as a man and has undergone gender-affirming surgery, which person goes on which side of the pedigree? Furthermore, gender identity may change over time and so placing an individual’s family lineage on the left or the right based on gender could result in the unnecessary and confusing re-drawing of pedigrees over time. Eliminating the left/right prescription also de-prioritizes males, who previously would be the first person encountered when “reading” a pedigree from left to right. Yes, I recognize that a pedigree can be read in many ways, not just left to right, and the proband arrow is the initial focal point that draws you into the image. But the standard reading frame in Western languages is left to right. And the pedigree’s generation/individual numbering system (I-1, I-2, II-2, etc.) is such that individual #1 in the pedigree (I-1) is usually the male founder of the paternal lineage.

Pedigrees and genealogies in one form or another go back well over a thousand years. During that time, while it has been by no means uniform and universal, the majority of pedigrees followed the paternal lineage left/maternal lineage right tradition. So how did this tradition arise (for clarity, I’m going to stick with the terms paternal and maternal to keep with the linguistic flavor of the times during which pedigrees have evolved)? One possibility, of course, is that it was a fifty/fifty kind of thing. When you divide the world up into two genders, one gender’s family will wind up on the left and one will wind up on the right and so it may have been that the paternal lineage just wound up on the left and the maternal lineage wound up on the right. But I think that a trip back through the history of pedigrees and other genealogical diagrams reveals the influence of the Western male gaze in establishing this tradition, along with eugenics, and, of all things, the Roman Catholic Church.

Let’s start this backwards journey in 1995, when the Pedigree Standardization Task Force published it’s original guidelines. Figure 2 in that article states “If possible, male partner should be to left of female partner on the relationship line.” Why did we make that recommendation? Because, well, that’s the way we were taught to draw pedigrees. It was a given; we didn’t think about it too much.

From Figure 2 of the original NSGC Pedigree Standardization Guidelines.

Go back about a century or so, and we see the role of eugenics in shaping pedigree format. In 1912, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) published Bulletin No, 7, The Family History Book. Page 94 of that booklet contains a somewhat condescending critique of a pedigree of a “dysgenic” family, drawn by one the ERO’s primarily female Eugenic Field Workers, for the purposes of illustrating pedigree standards. The authors state “In this pedigree, the field worker has charted the males to the right and females to the left; this should be reversed for sake of uniformity of practice.” But they make no mention of where/why that practice arose. This same ERO publication recommended using the generation/individual Roman/Arabic numbering system for generations and individuals alluded to above.

Over in England, the male gaze was at work as well. The Treasury of Human Inheritance, a key publication in the history of medical genetics and eugenics and first published in England in 1912, recommended using the Mars symbol (♂), the archetypal manly God of War, to depict males and the Venus symbol (♀), the archetypal female Goddess of Love, to depict females. Francis Galton’s book Natural Inheritance, published in 1889, contains what he describes as a schedule for recording a family history in Appendix G. Not exactly a pedigree but same idea. In this schedule, “Father and his fraternity” are on the left and “Mother and her fraternity” are on the right. Galton, by the way, believed that males were inherently smarter than females.

Galton’s recommended Family Schedule, Appendix G, from his 1889 book Natural Inheritance.

Now we take a larger leap backwards in time to the 16th century and the establishment of the College of Arms, which is still active today and is the “official heraldic authority for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and much of the Commonwealth including Australia and New Zealand.” Essentially the College of Arms assigns a coat of arms to a family based primarily on family history. This institution has been collecting pedigrees for about 5 centuries, typically with the format of paternal lineage on the left/maternal lineage on the right.

Pedigree of Nathaniel Littleton, from the College of Arms, published by the Foundation For Medieval Genealogy.

Even in modern days, with a few exceptions, women are expected to display the coat of arms of either their husband or their father. If she chooses to display both, the husband’s coat of arms is displayed to the left or above the wife’s family’s coat of arms.

Guidelines for Display of Coats of Arms for women, per The Heraldry Society.

Another method of displaying a family history is the ahnentafel (usually translated from German as “ancestor table”). An ahnentafel lists a family history horizontally from left to right. Individuals on an ahnentafel are assigned specific numbers that cleverly allow you to determine the relationship to the proband without scanning through the entire table. The first ahnentafel was published in 1590 by the Austrian nobleman Michaël Eytzinger and it depicted the ancestry of Henry III of France. Note that the father’s lineage is above the mother’s lineage.

Ahnentafel of King Henry III of France, published in 1590 by Michaël Eytzinger.
Ahnentafel of King Henry III of France, published in 1590 by Michaël Eytzinger, from Wikipedia.

Medieval pedigrees, of course, were critical to establishing the right to rule. Whether or not you were going to be declared a Royal, or if you were Gene Chandler trying to become the Duke of Earl, all depended on your relationship to the current king or prince or count or whatever title you were aspiring to. Entitlement to the throne or castle depended on who your male ancestors were, so medieval pedigrees often omitted women other than to list them as spouses. Unless, of course, it was convenient in staking your claim to the throne, in which case a woman’s lineage was included in the pedigree to legitimize the claim, as in the case of a Carolingian pedigree drawn at the end of the 12th century.

Carolingian (i.e., from Charlemagne) Pedigree from the late 12th century. Note at the top that the ancestral king is one the left and the ancestral queen is on the right. From The Genesis of The Family Tree by Christians Klapisch-Zuber.

It may come as a surprise to some that the Roman Catholic Church, an institution steeped in patriarchy, had a hand in emphasizing the importance of pedigrees and in shaping their format. The Catholic Church was the dominant authority in medieval Europe and played a role in regulating nearly every aspect of the lives of nobles and peasants alike. Going back to at least the 7th century, the Catholic Church had strong prohibitions against consanguineous unions, what they classified as “an impediment to marriage.” The bans extended well beyond first cousins. To guide prospective mates, the Church produced an arbor consanguinitatis, a generic diagram indicating how close various relations were to a given individual, often drawn with, you guessed it, the paternal lineage on the left and maternal lineage on the right. Of course, for the right price and for the right person, the Church was willing to permit such unions, and also to annul the same marriage on the grounds of consanguinity when that became convenient. As they did for Eleanor of Aquitane’s 12th century marriage and subsequent annulment to her relative King Edward VII of France, and then overlooked it again in her subsequent marriage to very-soon-to-be King Henry II of England, another of her relatives.

Arbor consanguinitatis, from Isidore of Seville’s 7th century manuscript Etymologiae. Note that the paternal lineage is one the left and the maternal is on the right.

The Catholic Church also employed pedigrees to illustrate the genealogy of Christ, the so-called Tree of Jesse (Jesse was the father of Goliath-slaying David and a direct ancestor of Christ). This was especially useful for instructing those who could not read the Bible, which was practically everybody who was not a priest or a noble. The earliest known Tree of Jesse dates to 1086, though the tradition of graphically depicting biblical ancestry goes back at least to The Great Stemma, which is thought to date to the 5th century (The Great Stemma, like modern pedigrees, also has a left-to-right reading frame, starting with Adam). Jesse Trees typically depicted only the male ancestors of Christ, along with various other Biblical personages on the sidelines, cheering on the progression of the generations. These trees typically omitted Mary’s lineage (though often included an image of her) but did include the ancestors of Joseph, who technically is Christ’s stepfather and not his biological parent. Many include an actual tree emerging from Jesse’s groin, an image sometimes referred to as, ahem, “the rod of Jesse” (males and their delusional obsession with their penises, thinking they give rise to great trees!). It was not uncommon for kings to insert themselves into a version of a Tree of Jesse, likely in an attempt to show divine approval of their kingship, such as the elaborate family tree of England’s King Edward IV produced in 1461. The trees took on many forms over the years and can be found as illustrations in manuscripts, carvings, and on stained glass windows churches even to the modern day.

Tree of Jesse, depicted on a stained glass window from the Cathedral of Our Lady Of Chartres.
Rod of Jesse, by the Flemish engraver Johannes (Jan) Wierix (1573)

Another way that the Catholic Church may have influenced the appearance of a pedigree – and here I am speculating – is that it’s traditions may have been the source of placing the paternal lineage on the left and the maternal lineage on the right. A Catholic altar is often divided up into three parts – center, right, and left. The center is devoted to God. The right side – from the perspective of a priest looking out at the church – is devoted to Mary, the female. The left side is often devoted to Joseph, the male. Thus, think of looking at a pedigree as a priest looking out on a Church – paternal lineage to your left, maternal lineage to your right. Furthermore, in Catholic iconography, Mary is typically depicted as the right hand of Christ in Heaven. So it would be natural to follow that tradition when drawing a pedigree.

The Coronation of Mary in Heaven, from the apse of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome (painted by Jacopo Torriti in 1295).

The story of the pedigree is more detailed and complex than I describe here, and probably goes even further back to the Roman Empire. What the story reveals is that even though a pedigree is an apparently objective and straight-forward graphical depiction of ancestry, it is suffused with the values of the people who construct them. The male bias in pedigrees was so embedded in Western European culture that it naturally spilled over into the architecture, appearance, and content of pedigrees. Sometimes those values are consciously articulated, as with the Task Force’s decision to recommend a gender-focused pedigree. More often, though, those values and biases are so engrained that we can’t see or perceive them, unless we march into the future with our eyes fixed on the past.

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  • – The views expressed here are entirely my own and not necessarily those of other Pedigree Task Force Members or the NSGC.

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by | January 3, 2023 · 7:08 PM

No Quibbling Over Sibling: Sisters and Brothers We Are One!

Gender-neutral language has evoked anything but neutrality. What with snide remarks about non-gendered pronouns and the politicized and contrived fears about how such language is a sinister plot to groom children for non-heterosexual behavior and non-binary gender identities, you would think gender-neutral language is a major threat to democratic institutions or an existential crisis for humanity on the scale of climate change. But these attacks lack substance and mostly just reveal a lot about our conscious and subconscious insecurities and biases, as well as our uneasiness with change. Language, especially the language of science, needs to be respectful and supportive of all people in all their infinite variety. Being decent shouldn’t be hard.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The history of the word “sibling” demonstrates how a gender-neutral term can be readily incorporated into language without fanfare or brouhaha (a word whose origin is said to be the sound of the cry – Brou-Ha-Ha! – made by a devil disguised as a priest, a stock character in French medieval plays). The story of sibling also takes an interesting detour through eugenics, craniometry, sexism, and fragile male egos.

Both sib and sibling go back to Old English around the year 1000 CE. Sibb, as it was often spelled in Ye* Olde English, simply meant any relative, regardless of gender or sex. The -ling suffix in sibling at the time likely did not have the diminutive implication it acquired later, and probably implied a sense of “familykind,” like adding -kind to human to yield humankind. Both sib and sibling mean the same thing. Incidentally, sib is cognate with the -sip ending of the word gossip, which came from the Old English word godsibb, a sponsor or godparent. Many centuries later, through the vagaries of language change, gossip developed its modern sense of petty talk about others that may or may not be true, an etymologically appropriate connection considering all the gossip about gender neutral language.

Old English had grammatical gender, just as the Romance languages do today, which makes the gender neutrality of sibling all the more notable. Grammatical gender started to disappear from English under Viking rule in what was called the Danelaw region of England in the 9th and 10th centuries. Old Norse, the language spoken by Vikings, was not a gendered language. I reckon a bunch of Vikings were not going to sit down and make a good faith effort to learn the complicated and random gender assignments of inanimate objects of a country they had just pillaged and plundered. It was just easier to drop grammatical gender altogether. When you rule a country and have a fearsome reputation, it’s much easier to accomplish that. This also demonstrates that an entire language can become more gender neutral.

By the end of the 15th century, sibling seems to have fallen into disuse. Standard etymology sources suggest it disappeared altogether until re-emerging in 1903, although Google’s Ngram viewer indicates the word began to be used again in the last half of the 17th century, albeit rarely.

So what’s so special about 1903 that sibling should suddenly re-emerge as a common word in the English language? In 2 words – genetics and its alter-ego, eugenics, both of which took root in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Interest in familial disorders blossomed, as did the publication of pedigrees and articles that discussed family members. Looking for a shorthand way to say “brothers and sisters” when referring to the offspring of parents, an article published in 1903 titled “On the laws of inheritance in man” in the journal Biometrika, authored by Biometrika’s Editor Karl Pearson and his student/assistant Alice Lee, included this perfectly boring but linguistically notable sentence:

These will enable us, by using the formulae of simple or multiple correlation, which depend simply on linearity, to predict the probable character in any individual from a knowledge of one or more parents or brethren (“siblings,” = brothers or sisters).

There, parenthetically snuck in at the end of the sentence, Pearson and Lee resurrected and repurposed the word sibling, although without the intention of waving the banner of gender neutrality. But the point is that a gender-neutral term can be introduced into scientific discourse and eventually common discourse as well without the collapse of civilization as we know it. Pearson’s imprimatur, given his role as editor of a prestigious journal and towering reputation as an innovative mathematical statistician, probably helped with sibling’s wide acceptance. It’s also possible that earlier authors may have used the word sibling but it has so far escaped our notice. Nonetheless, the word was uncommon enough in 1903 that Pearson and Lee felt the need to define it.

Pearson and Lee are interesting stories in their own right, and here is where the story detours into eugenics, craniometry, fragile male egos, and sexism. Pearson was a key figure in the development of mathematical statistics. Most readers of this blog are familiar with the chi-squared test, the standard deviation, and the correlation statistic r, formally known as Pearson’s product-moment co-efficient, all of which are usually attributed to Pearson. As a prominent disciple of Francis Galton, he was also a dyed-in-the-wool eugenicist. Many of his statistical innovations were developed in the service of eugenics. True to eugenic form, Pearson also reportedly called sibling “a good Anglo-Saxon word.”

Alice Lee was one of the first women to earn a D. Sc. in Mathematics at University College London. At a time when women were regarded as intellectually inferior to men, her thesis set out to prove otherwise. Managing to talk her way into a meeting of the all-male Anatomical Society in Dublin in 1898, she managed to get 35 distinguished anatomists to agree to let her measure their heads. Her thesis compared those measurements to the head measurements of male faculty at University College and to the head measurements of female students at Bedford College where she was a faculty member (Bedford College was England’s first all-female institute of higher learning). Not only did her results show no correlation between intelligence and head size, some leading anatomists and one of the men on her thesis committee had some of the smallest head sizes (talk about an intimidatingly scary thesis defense – publicly telling a committee member he has a small brain!). One anatomist had a skull capacity that was less than 50% of the women students. Her findings, as you might guess, were not well received. Her work was criticized by her committee as “unscientific” because, well, everybody knows that women’s brains are smaller and they have lower intelligence than men and the committee didn’t like having a finger stuck in the eye of their male egos. Even Galton, who was not on her committee, was asked to weigh in and he too criticized her work on the same grounds. But Lee persisted, and with support from Pearson, who backed her analysis, she was awarded her doctorate. Lee’s research, with her listed as first author, was eventually published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Despite her skills, she remained a low-paid assistant for her entire career and was only awarded a pension when Pearson again stepped in on her behalf.

Lee’s measurements of the brains of anatomists. Note that her thesis committee member, Sir William Turner, has the 8th smallest brain. (Image from Wikipedia)
Alice Lee
Alice Lee, statistician, shrinker of male brains and male egos. (Image from Wikipedia)

Now back to the sibling story. English, of course, is not the only language that has a gender-neutral word for siblings. For example, German geschwister essentially translates as sibling. As does the Turkish word kardeş, which has a delightful etymology. The word was initially karindaş, a combination of karin (“belly”) + daş (“sharer”). Siblings shared a womb (usually asynchronously) and were therefore “belly sharers.”

Sibling has produced its own linguistic offspring (another gender neutral term that goes back to Old English). Nibling, a term for the children of your siblings (niece/nephew+sibling), was supposedly coined by the Yale linguist Samuel E. Martin in 1951, with a colleague “Dr. Sane.” But I have been unable to track down a citation by Martin proving this nor could I dig up anything about “Dr. Sane.” Chibling (children of my siblings) is a more recent variant of nibling. Pibling, a term for aunts and uncles (parent+sibling) was, as far as I can tell, coined in a brief 2005 article in the British Journal of General Practice authored by Dr. Neville Goodman. Perhaps I will be proved wrong, but to my ear these words sound too cute and contrived to gain wide acceptance. For what it’s worth, my spellchecker tried to correct chibling and pibling, but not nibling.

English, and many other languages, have plenty of gender-neutral terms. Introducing new terms, resurrecting old ones, or just using words we’ve always used, doesn’t need to create social drama or political warfare. No grammar drama is necessary. Language changes and the world still manages to stay on its axis.

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*- For the language nerds out there, the “Y” in Ye is actually not the letter Y. It is an approximation of the now-defunct English alphabet letter thorn (Þ). Thorn is a phoneme sometimes pronounced like the th sound in “the” and sometimes like the th sound in “thick.” Thorn originated in the runic alphabet and was used in Old and Middle English. The printing press was imported into England in the 1470’s from Belgium and the Netherlands, countries whose native alphabets did not include thorn. The closest approximation that the printer’s types had to thorn was the letter y. So Ye Olde English is actually “The Old English.”

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by | November 28, 2022 · 11:14 AM

Acting In Bad Faith? A Proposed Religion-Based Genetic Counseling Training Program

As some DNA Exchange readers may know, Union University, a self-described Christ-centered school in Tennessee, is working to establish a faith-based genetic counseling training program. According to the school’s website, the program’s goal is “to train and equip excellent genetic counselors who are compassionate pro-life Christians.” As far as I know, the program has not yet applied for accreditation through the Accreditation Council For Genetic Counseling (ACGC), though it is apparently planning to do so. The program is also seeking endorsements from the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Christian Medical and Dental Association. For all that, it does not yet appear to have the funding to support the program.

Let me be clear up front – I am not anti-religion. Religion plays a critical role for many of us in establishing our identities, values, core beliefs, communities, and how we cope with and understand the world around us. Nor am I critical of any genetic counselor who has deeply held religious beliefs or opposes abortion; religious diversity only enriches the profession. But I am critical of religious teachings that can cause harm and that are used to justify sub-standard medical care.

The program describes pro-life genetic counseling as focusing on these values:

  • Relationship and community within a Christian context, including prayer for and with the patients
  • Carefully and lovingly applying Scripture to each situation
  • An in-depth interpretation of the genetic data, including ambiguities, in ways that all patients can understand
  • Connecting patients with others in similar situations
  • Advocating for children born with non-traditional genetic profiles
  • Advocating for adoption in all of its Biblical forms
  • Applying Christian genetic counseling principles to patients making genetically-related decisions at any age, including decisions regarding reproduction or end of life issues
  • Providing continuing education on the latest data and advancements in the field through the academy and to the greater public

I am not sure who the faculty might be. The program’s administrator has a PhD in Experimental Pathology and specializes in plant tissue culture but does not appear to have training, publications, or accreditation in medical genetics or genetic counseling. A director is not named though the site acknowledges that this person needs to be a certified genetic counselor.

I suspect that, like me, many genetic counselors are not comfortable with the idea of a faith-based training program. It’s like having a Creationist teach a course on evolution. I don’t know which specific Christian tenets the Union program will adhere to as there is some variability in the moral positions and beliefs of different branches of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Tennessee Baptist Convention, which the school is affiliated with. But there are a number of potential concerns in terms of the ability of the program to produce appropriately trained graduates whose practice can conform to the NSGC Code of Ethics and provide compassionate care that supports the wide spectrum of core beliefs, values, and life styles across the patient population.

Reproductive options such as abortion, gamete and embryo donation, and carrier screening for purposes of avoiding or terminating a pregnancy are explicitly prohibited by most Evangelical Christian churches. Hence faith-based genetic counseling does not provide, as the NSGC Code of Ethics states, “the necessary facts, and clarifying the alternatives and anticipated consequences.” This violates a long-standing core principle of the practice of genetic counseling. One might argue that these are not viable options anyway for some Evangelical Christians and so it is not a serious ethical lapse if they are not offered. But a good counselor will clarify up front what the patient’s values are and, if patients are opposed to certain courses of action, then those options will not be offered or judged. A good counselor will also not assume that Evangelical Christians are a monolithic block who all strictly adhere to their church’s teachings about contraception and abortion. What matters is not what choices are available to all patients. Rather what is important is to explore the choices available to a specific patient based on their values, beliefs, and social situations.

Another area of concern about faith-based genetic counseling relates to matters of sex, sexuality, and gender. For most Evangelical Christians, there are two and only two sexes and two genders based on sex and gender assigned at birth, gender is biologically determined (man and woman), anything other than sex between husband and wife is not permissible, and homosexual behavior is not tolerated. If an unmarried couple or a single pregnant person came for genetic counseling, could the counselor withhold overt moral judgment? This belief would also make it impossible to utilize the most recent pedigree standardization guidelines, which emphasizes the importance of appropriately depicting people of different genders as well as those who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth.

And the school takes their censure of homosexuality seriously. In 2015, Union University withdrew from its association with the Council of Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU) after CCCU failed to censure two other affiliated schools that altered their hiring and benefits policies to include same-sex couples. In 2017, Union’s president and 3 faculty were signatories to The Nashville Statement, a document that condemns homosexuality. In 2020, Union University rescinded the admission of a student in their graduate-level nursing program after it was discovered that he was in a same-sex relationship, and other LGBQT+ students claim the school has tried to them to undergo harmful conversion therapy. The school’s code of conduct, called a Community Covenant, states that “The promotion, advocacy, defense, or ongoing practice of a homosexual lifestyle (including same-sex dating behaviors) is also contrary to our community values.” So a genetic counselor who graduated from such a program could not even publicly or professionally support patients who are not cisgender heterosexual.

In Evangelical Christian teaching, people who are intersex are accepted into the church but told, quoting from the Bible (Matthew 19:12), that they are “eunuchs who were born that way from their mother’s womb” and that God will reveal their “true” sex and they will be “healed” on the Last Judgment Day. It is, of course, biologically inaccurate to state there are only two sexes and genders and that people who are intersex are somehow broken. It is also psychologically and socially damaging and leads to higher suicide rates and psychological trauma for people who are intersex and/or non-binary. There’s nothing pro-life about that. And I suspect that most intersex people would be offended at being called “eunuchs.”

Some Evangelical Christian teachings, and Catholic teachings for that matter, typically prohibit contraception and sterilization, except in certain rare circumstances, even though contraception – surgical or otherwise – can result in improved health and economic well-being for women and families. For some Evangelicals and Catholics, this ban could also be interpreted to mean that women who carry pathogenic BRCA1/2 mutations might not be able to obtain a pre-menopausal risk-reducing oophorectomy. Not surprisingly, the Evangelical stance on sterilization and contraception has historical ties to eugenics (of course, so does genetic counseling so we can’t claim the moral high ground here) and the fear that Christians, especially White Christians, are reproducing at lower rates and will be replaced by other races and people with other religious beliefs who purportedly  have higher fertility rates (I know of no direct connection between eugenics and Union University or its genetic counseling program). Madison Grant continues to raise his ugly head. Furthermore, Union is affiliated with the Tennessee Baptist Association, which itself is, as noted above, affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in Georgia in 1845 by white supremacists and supported slavery and anti-miscegenation laws, and opposed the Civil Rights Movement well into the 20th century, though by the 1990s, the Southern Baptist Convention denounced its past ties to these beliefs and is now ethnically and racially more diverse.

People who identify as Christian, especially conservative Christians, are less likely to utilize genetic testing and counseling and providers who identify as Christian are less likely to offer these services to their patients. Since about 14% of Americans identify as White Evangelical Protestants, they represent a significant minority who are possibly not being reached by currently available genetic services. Faith-based genetic counselors could argue that they would increase the utilization of genetic counseling in this population, which would align with principles that are key to NSGC’s JEDI initiatives. However, they are doing nothing to address JEDI issues, and in fact are working at cross-purposes to it if they are providing sub-standard and inaccurate counseling and condemning anything other than heterosexual behavior and telling people who are born with sexual variations that they are “broken.” The genetic counseling profession embraces diversity, including religious diversity, but it does not support intolerance.

On the other hand, the genetic counseling profession needs to make clear that it is very supportive of the range of religious views of their patients. We are perfectly capable of working with conservative religious patients while also maintaining our personal religious beliefs. The experience of even some of the more conservative Amish groups with genetics by and large shows this.  And, as Frances Collins and other scientists demonstrate, Evangelical Christian and other religious scientists and physicians participate in first class and ethically acceptable genetic services and scientific endeavors while accepting standard scientific theory, research, and data and without receiving training from a conservative religious institution. But clearly the genetic counseling profession can do better at actively working with religious groups to demonstrate that genetic counselors can provide services in a supportive, respectful, and non-judgmental manner and supporting our colleagues who are religiously conservative.

I am not familiar with the fine details of obtaining ACGC accreditation, but I do know that it is a lengthy, demanding, and complicated process. It is possible, maybe even probable, that ACGC will deny certification to Union University. The program could then decide to develop their own accrediting organization that specifically certifies only graduates of faith-based programs. After all, that’s what genetic counselors did when we separated from the American Board of Medical Genetics back in 1992. While this would likely be illegal in some states that already have genetic counseling licensure, it might be less of an issue in states that don’t currently have licensure. It’s also possible that some conservative legislatures in states that already have licensure would be willing to modify existing laws to extend genetic counseling licensure to graduates of faith-based programs.

Faith-based genetic counseling can be read as being part of a larger problem of some religious groups using legislatures and judiciaries to dictate medical care guidelines for the general population that aligns with the religion’s beliefs. In addition, some religious groups have increased their control of the practices and policies of health care institutions by purchasing them as well as by creating versions of health insurance plans, something I warned about a decade ago in a 2013 plenary session at the NSGC Annual Education Conference (Thursday, October 10, 2013 at 9:45 AM, to be precise). For example, Catholic hospitals comprise the largest non-profit group of health care providers in the US. This can result in severely limiting access to abortion in states where it is still legal and and reducing access to contraception and surgical sterilization. They are literally trying to force the entire US population to embrace a very narrow minority interpretation of Christian theology.

But the profession can’t only be angry about it, however justified the anger might be. We can’t ignore and dismiss it. We have to understand it, adapt our practice, respond thoughtfully, examine some of our core ethical principles, and be willing to take a stand on controversial issues. It raises some tough questions, but we have to answer them.

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by | November 1, 2022 · 1:19 PM

Guest Post: Prison Abolition 101 (For Genetic Counselors) by Cassandra Barrett, PhD, CGC; Artwork by Mike Nickles

 

 

About the author: Cassandra Barrett graduated from the University of Utah graduate program in genetic counseling in 2021. She holds a Ph.D. in biological engineering and specializes in neurogenetics, variant classification, and precision medicine. She has been involved with prison organizing and education since 2017 and is currently an organizer with Liberation Lit in the Kansas City area. She can be reached at cas9bar@gmail.com

About the artist: Mike Nickles is an artist and writer from Hillsboro, Kansas. He is currently incarcerated in the Lansing Correctional Facility. Mike shares his work with the hope that more people will know the truth about the realities of incarceration and be moved to action. You can follow and connect with Mike on his new Instagram page where he shares his art and writing @inside_out_mike.

People in prison are not a group we think about much when it comes to J.E.D.I initiatives in genetic counseling. What do prisons even have to do with genetics? I have been involved in prison organizing and education for about six years now. As I have learned over time from my mentors and friends on the inside – mass incarceration impacts everything, everywhere, all the time. And that includes genetic counseling.

My hope in writing here is to get more genetic counselors thinking about the impacts the prison industrial complex has on our patients, our profession, and our own lives. So, in the spirit of subversion, I want to share some of the effects I have seen; I’m sure there are many more interfaces between the prison system and genetic counseling that I have yet to think of. I will add a disclaimer that I have never been incarcerated, nor have I had any close family who has been incarcerated.

The first and most simple connection is that (formerly) incarcerated people are our patients. In fact, they are quite likely to be people who could benefit from genetic counseling. Individuals with disabilities are massively over-represented in the prison population. In many cases people are incarcerated as a function of ableism, whether that’s a person with a neurological condition such as Huntington’s disease being arrested secondary to their symptoms, a Deaf or nonverbal person being unable to communicate with poorly trained police, or a person with disabilities being forced into poverty and therefore more contact with police. It goes without saying that BIPOC Deaf and disabled people face the greatest risk here. The overturning of Roe v. Wade has also expanded the risk of incarceration for pregnant people and their providers.

When I started my master’s program in genetic counseling I had already been involved for a while in prison education, teaching Biology 101 on a volunteer basis. I was excited to learn more about genetic counseling practices and competencies specific to counseling incarcerated patients. I quickly realized there would be no such resources forthcoming. Despite the fact that we all counsel folks who have experienced incarceration, there is next to no discussion of the needs of this population within our profession. I have only ever found a single role play and one wonderful master’s thesis relating to genetic counseling for incarcerated women (if you know of any more resources, send them my way!). In a country where over 600,000 people go to prison annually, this is an important area of cultural competency to be trained in. As a majority white cis female profession, I suspect that most of us have never considered ourselves to be at risk of incarceration. In fact, many of us may feel that we benefit from prisons. These days my prison organizing work is centered on mutual learning and relationship building, rather than teaching.

I want to be cautious about advocating that genetic counselors invest time in building out cultural competency toolkits, research projects, roleplays, courses, etc. around incarceration. While these are important things to do and should be done, I instead hope that we will focus more of our efforts on ending mass incarceration and build systems of true accountability and restorative justice. The actions of the prison system itself speak loudly in favor of its own abolition. Learning about the realities of daily life for people in prison is an important way to inform our counseling and our politics. But prisons are intended to be cut off from the rest of the world. They are often built in rural communities. It’s hard to get information in and out of a prison. I have come to see this as an intentional part of their construction. If more of us knew about the realities of prison life, it would be much more difficult to justify their continued existence. I hope that this is just a starting point that will lead any readers to seek the firsthand accounts of people most impacted by incarceration. A reading list with some good places to start is provided at the end. And I want to share with you a few things I have heard repeatedly from my incarcerated pen pals, students, and co-organizers and that have been published in peer reviewed studies of prison life. I hope you will take time to digest these stories, consider the questions they raise, and ask your own.

❖ Prison wages are shockingly low. The average national wage is 63 cents per hour. In some states, work is unpaid. In Louisiana for example, many incarcerated people still pick cotton for as little as 2 cents per hour. Many people in state prisons work to keep the prison running, support state institutions, or are contracted out by the prison as laborers. I’ve known people who built furniture for the university where I got my master’s in genetic counseling, printed flyers for the state department of health, took customer service calls for the state DMV, or made debt collection calls for private companies. Private prisons are by no means the only institutions benefitting from exploitative practices. In what ways might your institution benefit from this type of exploitation? How is your patient with an incarcerated parent going to afford genetic testing given such wages?

❖ Costs in prison are shockingly high. It will cost someone in prison 25 cents to send a character-limited e-message to a loved one and just as much for the loved one to message them back. Imagine spending a quarter for every text you send in a day. Communication services in prison are big money. Adding money to an account to make calls or for someone to buy toiletries at the commissary (a small convenience store inside the prison) will be coupled with massive “service fees”- think Ticketmaster x10. Commissary prices are massively inflated. During this summer’s heat wave, the cost of a small fan in the Kansas prisons where I live was $44 or 440 hours of work with the state wage here. By the time folks can afford a fan, it will already be winter. Prisons make big money for their contracted vendors. Does your company’s retirement investment portfolio include any prison vendors? How much money is it going to cost your patient to call their incarcerated family member for more family health history information?

❖ Prison is disgusting. One of my pen pals in Oregon asked me to tell everyone I know that he was recently served a cockroach floating in syrup for breakfast. Their kitchen has a rat infestation. In some places, shared toilets are only flushable a few times per day. You go until it is full because you and the dozens of other people on your bunk can only flush four times per day. You have to buy soap, menstrual products, deodorant, etc. out of your own pocket at high commissary costs. Not all your bunk mates will be able to afford this. With no A/C on in your dormitory, the smell alone will keep you awake all night. Lack of proper climate control is a common issue across prisons leading to mold infestations and heat/cold related deaths and illness. Is this the type of environment you would recommend for your patients? How might you feel and behave in such an environment?

❖ Prisons are cruel. Suicide watch involves being locked in a cell all by yourself with the lights on 24/7, naked except for a heavy “anti-suicide smock.” People in prison are routinely denied healthcare and may have their diagnoses withheld from them. I have had students in prison who were denied x-rays for broken bones and who were not told they had terminal cancer. Sexual assaults both by other incarcerated people and the staff meant to guard them are commonplace. Like on the outside, Deaf people and those with disabilities are disproportionately targeted. HEARD, a cross disability abolitionist organization, estimates that some 80% of Deaf people in prison are raped while incarcerated. If you are sexually assaulted and require an abortion, you will have to pay for it yourself in 16 states, if you are even allowed access to the procedure by staff. The average cost is over $500, or 793 hours of work for the average incarcerated person (although people incarcerated in women’s prisons tend to earn less than those in men’s prisons, just like on the outside). If you give birth instead, you may be shackled during the process and likely will not be allowed to hold your own baby once they are born. How do genetic counselors put patients into contact with the carceral system through mandatory reporting, documentation of medical procedures, etc.? What screening procedures, medical diets, mobility aids, genetic information, etc. are people in prison being barred from?

These stories are commonplace and routine. They do not represent failures of the system but are rather purposeful features of it. As genetic counselors we know that individual genetic conditions may be rare, but as a whole they are common. They too affect us all. Discussions about ending incarceration belong in genetic counseling because we are all impacted. I hope we can begin to equip ourselves to have those conversations through education and relationship building. I look forward to hearing what questions come up within our community and how they may shape our practice moving forward. It’s a long road, but it’s time to get started on down the path.

Resources

Pen pal programs are incredibly important! Isolation in prisons is a serious issue. For those of us on the outside, building relationships with people on the inside is essential if we are committed to this work. My pen pals are some of the coolest people I know and writing letters is a simple way to get involved. There are many organizations that run pen pal programs including Black and Pink, Liberation Lit, and Abolition Apostles.

The Visiting Room Project is a collection of stories about the realities of life without parole in Angola State Prison in Louisiana, a place with the highest concentration of individuals serving life sentences in the world.

Ear Hustle is a podcast about “the daily realities of life inside prison shared by those living it, and stories from the outside, post-incarceration.”

Resisting Invisibility is a blog published by Liberation Lit, a group of readers both inside and outside of prisons working to build a better world without cages. For full transparency, I am an organizer with Liberation Lit.

Mariame Kaba, Dean Spade, Victoria Law, and adrienne maree brown are just a few important, accessible organizers and authors whose work is incredible and essential. They have been a part of exciting initiatives including the NYC Transformative Justice Hub and Project NIA that provide resources to begin tackling difficult questions about prison abolition (If not prisons, then what? What about the rapists, the murders? How do we keep ourselves safe?). Check out their work and any/all publications by these authors. I especially recommend Prisons Make Us Safer: And 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration by Victoria Law as an introduction to the realities of the prison system in the United States. 

If you are looking to do some truly deeper diving, this is the place to go for an archive of resources.

Finally, I have previously published a related article in Perspectives in Genetic Counseling. The intersection of genetic counseling and the prison industrial complex is an area I hope to continue writing about; I welcome any feedback, questions, and connections from colleagues!

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by | May 15, 2022 · 5:57 PM

The Power Of Symbols: The Pedigree As A Tool of Conformity and Oppression

Pedigrees are paragons of infographics — “graphic visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present information quickly and clearly.” Yup, that’s pretty much what a pedigree is. Just think of how much clinical and genetic information you can glean from scanning a pedigree for even just a few moments. Eliciting a pedigree during a counseling session is also a great way to establish rapport and trust with a patient, get a grasp on family dynamics, and gain insight into patients’ understanding of disease etiology (“I’m not very close with my father. He left when I was pretty young. I think he had leukemia but he worked in a shipyard and was exposed to all kinds of chemicals.”). The family story is often more interesting than the family history. Then there’s that appealingly simple geometry of squares/circles/diamonds/lines and the satisfying symmetry of the paternal lineage on the left and the maternal lineage on the right. Nice, neat, clinically objective, non-judgmental, and harmless, right?

Well, maybe not always so harmless and objective. Symbols can be imbued with power by the information they communicate and that power can be used to control, harm, and manipulate people and reinforce social power structures.

As I’ve written about before in this space before, pedigree nomenclature and structure reflect what Judaeo-Christian Westernized cultural values consider to be an “ideal family.” Standard pedigree structure works best for a single mating between a man and a woman, along with their respective offspring and antecedent and descendant generations. Maybe you can squeeze in a second mating for one or two individuals in the family, but after that, things get pretty messy and difficult to read.

Over the last century or so, cousin marriages have been discouraged in most Westernized countries and in some cases are illegal. Although pedigrees can incorporate an occasional consanguineous mating without becoming too unwieldy, the picture gets complicated if there are multiple inbreeding loops like those found in the many societies where cousin marriage is the norm. And as far as sex and gender go, you have two choices — square or circle, man or woman — that are dictated by an assessment of your genitalia (this will change with the latest iteration of pedigree nomenclature; see below).

The implicit cultural messages here are that you should have one life-long unrelated mate and that you are either a man or a woman, no allowances made for people who identify otherwise.

The oppressive potential of pedigrees is illustrated in the pedigrees collected by the Eugenics Record Office, which operated out of Cold Spring Harbor on New York’s Long Island in the first few decades of the 20th century. Look at the trait key used to classify people in a pedigree and it evokes a smile, an eye roll, tears,  a grimace, a forehead slap, or all of the above. Sexually immoral. Criminalistic. Wanderer. Neurotic (for those of you who like language trivia, the pointing finger symbol that is used to indicate a proband is called a manicule or, more informally, a bishop’s finger).

Pedigree Symbols Used By The Eugenics Record Office

But these labels and symbols are not just harmless historical curiosities that were the products of a few warped minds. This was the era of mandatory sterilization laws in the US and elsewhere. If one of those symbols represented you, the state had the legal right to perform surgery on you against your will to prevent you from having any(more) children. Three generations of imbeciles are enough already, and that ruling was by a liberal Supreme Court that included Louis Brandeis in the majority opinion.

In contrast to how “dysgenic” families were portrayed, pedigrees could manipulate the viewer in the other direction by omitting information of eugenically desirable families. The Darwin Family pedigree below was, for all intents and purposes, the logo of The Eugenics Education Society, headquartered in London and whose president at the time was Leonard Darwin, one of Charles Darwin’s sons. Note that virtually all of the males in the family are “Brilliant” or had “Scientific Ability” but none of the women apparently possessed these traits. More subtly, many of the dysgenic traits described in eugenically undesirable families were omitted from the Darwin pedigree – opium addiction, deafness, intellectual disabilities (Darwin’s much beloved last child, Charles Waring Darwin, likely had Down syndrome), seizures, and alcoholism. Indeed, Darwin himself was so concerned about his family history that he wrote a letter to his father asking for his advice before starting a family (Darwin’s father wrote a similar letter to his father too).

A stark illustration of the power of symbols came up in discussions about updating pedigree nomenclature among the NSGC Pedigree Standardization Task Force, of which I am a member. One of our recommendations is a gender-first nomenclature, that is, a person’s self-identified gender should dictate the symbol’s shape, not their sex assigned at birth. We also considered symbols to use for people who do not identify as either male or female. In reviewing the literature and eliciting suggestions from the genetics and other communities, some suggested using an inverted triangle for someone whose gender identity is nonbinary. However, we rejected that suggestion in favor of a diamond shape because inverted triangle badges were used in Nazi concentration camps to distinguish among the various types of prisoners, such as political prisoners, criminals, prisoner of war, “gentiles who assisted Jews,” Roma, mentally ill, or Jews (the Magen David is essentially, two triangles). The triangle that defined you could mean the difference between life and death.

                            Inverted triangles used to distinguish among the types of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.                 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge

The potential harm of pedigree symbols looms large today now that states have taken to passing laws that criminalize abortion. Suppose that you are practicing in a state like Louisiana after a strict anti-abortion law is passed and you are taking a family history from a someone who had a pregnancy in which anencephaly was diagnosed and she managed to obtain a pregnancy termination through an underground network. If you document that pregnancy with the annotation VTOP (voluntary termination of pregnancy) below, you could potentially open her up to legal prosecution.

                                                                  Evidence of a crime in some states

 A similar outcome could arise in a states like Texas or Alabama that have banned gender-affirming treatment for children, legislation that, as far as I can tell, is often motivated by cynical politics and hate-driven willful ignorance. If you practice in these states and are consulting with a parent who has a child who identifies as female but was assigned male at birth and has undergone gender-affirming treatment such as puberty blockers, you would – under the new guidelines – depict this in the pedigree with a diamond, the annotation AMAB (Assigned Male at Birth), and perhaps further annotations about what treatment was provided. If that pedigree fell into the wrong hands, the parents and the treating physician could be charged with child abuse. And, by law, you may be required to report it to the state, just as health professionals are usually required to report any type of child abuse.

                                                                         Pedigree indicating child abuse in some states

A genetic counselor could be put in the position of either falsifying the medical record or omitting clinically critical information. Talk about a rock and a hard place.

In the idyllic past, we mostly worried about insurance companies getting their hands on pedigrees. Now we have to worry about the prosecutorial system accessing them. Absolutely nothing good will come of that. It’s possible that the judicial system may block or limit some of these laws, but I am not too hopeful at the moment.

Nothing in science and medicine is value-neutral. Everything we utilize and do in our clinical practice can be used for good and for bad and we often have no control over how it is used and abused. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that one day future genetic counselors will look at our pedigrees and other practices and pass critical judgment on us. We should strive for ethical humility amidst our righteousness.

As an added bonus for that small circle of practitioners who love pedigrees as much as I do – fellow PedHeads – you might be interested in this article I wrote long ago in a genetic galaxy far away about the history of the pedigree in genetics.

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by | January 8, 2022 · 5:25 PM

The Questions We Should Really Be Asking After Reading the NY Times Article About Prenatal cfDNA Screening For Microdeletions

As the genetic counseling world knows all too well, the New York Times recently published a story about prenatal cfDNA screening for chromosomal microdeletion syndromes. The gist of the article is that screening for microdeletions has a high number of false positives that produce significant patient anxiety and, in a very small number of cases, patients have elected to terminate a pregnancy before confirmatory diagnostic testing. The Times piece generated 1100+ comments on its site, including many from genetic counselors and physicians, not to mention vitriolic sturm und drang on various social media.

Clearly the article touched a collective genetic counselor nerve — a lot of the reaction has been more reflexive than reflective. Which is kind of surprising, considering that cfDNA for microdeletions is a so-so screen for a handful of rare conditions that genetic counselors have not widely agreed should be included on these tests.

Most of the criticism centered on the article not always making a clear and consistent technical distinction between a screaming test, er, uh, I mean, a screening test (which cfNDA is) and a diagnostic test (which cfDNA is not). This confusion has been an ongoing problem since the early to mid-1980s when AFP screening for neural tube defects — and maternal anxiety over testing — was first working its way into clinical practice (I remember one of my patients back then referring to AFP as “alpha-fucking protein”). Forty years later, and the anxiety and misunderstanding has not improved much.

Some of those criticisms are fair, particularly when the article describes cfDNA results as being “wrong” or “inaccurate.” To the specialist, the term false positive has a very specific definition,* and hence the source of the reaction to the article. But from a semantics standpoint, doesn’t the word false in false positive imply wrong? You can also think of calling a result “wrong” as an example of the tried and true counseling strategy of reframing, i.e. “Well, Jane, your test result actually says that there is more than an 80-90% chance your baby does not have a microdeletion.”

In my opinion the article otherwise does a decent job of highlighting the statistical complexities of cfDNA. The accompanying Figures are helpful in explaining what is essentially the positive predictive value of the tests. In fact, I think the graphics are better than the explanations and graphics on many of the testing laboratories’ websites. Many of these websites are even guiltier of muddling the differences between screening and diagnostic tests, and labs really should know better. It’s no wonder that patients might be confused and anxious when they read that a test is “highly accurate,” “an alternative to amniocentesis or CVS,” and can be assured of a “healthy baby” when results are normal. To be fair, some of the websites also address the distinctions between screening tests and diagnostic tests, but only if you click down into the rabbit warren of information.

I think most of the criticism by genetic counselors glosses over more important and fundamental questions that should be the focus of critiques of prenatal testing and our reaction to the Times piece (here I am defining prenatal testing as including screening and diagnosis). These critical questions include:

• Should we test for any condition prenatally? This is an ethically and for some a religiously complex question but it underlies all of the subsequent questions.

• If there is broad agreement that prenatal testing should be available, then what is its purpose? Realistically, with a few exceptions, is there any purpose beyond selective termination? While termination is an important option and benefit of the test for some, it’s not a course of action that all parents will choose. Some parents might decide to have prenatal testing for “preparation” but as I have argued elsewhere there is minimal data saying one way or another whether prenatal knowledge of a condition helps babies or their families, medically, emotionally, or developmentally (thought at least one study is beginning to address this shortcoming). If patients are going to be put through the emotional ringer of prenatal testing, we should be able to provide solid data on whether prenatal knowledge of a condition provides benefits in addition to the option of termination.

• What criteria should be used in determining which conditions should be subject to prenatal testing? Even if every genetic condition could be detected prenatally (and we might actually get close to that point one day), it wouldn’t make sense to test for many of them. Clinically rational and ethically acceptable criteria need to be developed to guide the selection of conditions to consider for prenatal testing.

• Who decides which conditions are screen-worthy? As Ilana Löwy and others have noted, commercial labs often spearhead this choice but decisions are reinforced and supported by the medical and genetics communities that order the testing. If no one ordered a test, labs wouldn’t offer it. As Liza Minelli, Joel Grey, and Scarface remind us, money makes the world go around. Are we screening for some conditions primarily because we can screen for them and labs offer it? What about input from patients, the public, multiple medical specialties, ethicists, social scientists, people with disabilities, and others?

• Is widespread screening for rare conditions the best use of laboratory and genetic counseling resources? Follow up of screen positive results consumes a significant amount of genetic counselor time and energy, to say nothing of patients’ anxiety and health care costs. Should these resources be focused on more pressing conditions?

• Many jobs in the genetics sector — labs and clinical providers — are dependent on the existence of genetic testing. Labs make their living off of testing but so do many genetic counselors working in clinics. While genetic counselors are not trying to push testing on patients, many genetic counseling jobs depend on the availability of genetic testing, either helping patients decide whether to have a test or explaining results to them once the testing has been completed. For better and worse, the genetic counseling profession has intimately identified itself with genetic testing. Clinics would employ far fewer prenatal, cancer, cardiogenetics, and other specialty genetic counseling jobs if there were not so many genetic tests. Think about how many clinical positions would evaporate if prenatal testing — or, really, almost any genetic testing — disappeared tomorrow. Some jobs would remain, for sure. But the demand for genetic counseling would likely drop off significantly if fewer tests were available. How much does this conflict of interest influence genetic counselors’ attitudes toward, and willingness to adopt, genetic tests, and how much does it subtly and subconsciously influence some of the strong reaction to the Times article?

• First and foremost, a patient’s decision to undergo — or not — prenatal testing should be preceded by a soul-searching exploration with partners and care providers about what parents want out of their children and addressing parental fears of disability, along with ethical and spiritual reflection. The decision requires more emotional expertise than numerical expertise. Should we be offering tests to all pregnant women that require them to master abstruse statistical knowledge in order to decide about whether to pursue testing? Even in a (unrealistic) world where all pregnant patients meet with a genetic counselor prior to testing and everything was explained in excruciating detail, many patients will misinterpret, forget, and misunderstand most of the technical information about false positives, false negatives, and distinctions between diagnostic tests and screening tests. What is the best way for patients to make medically and emotionally informed decisions? Laboratory website are less than ideal sources of information. Websites are essentially marketing tools, and marketing is antithetical to nondirectiveness. Chatbots alone don’t cut it for this purpose, although they could have an ancillary role.

• What message does it send to people with disabilities, their families, and their advocates if we continually add, seemingly willy-nilly, more and more genetic conditions to the prenatal testing list, especially, as I noted above, if they obtain no tangible benefit from testing? More testing readily begets further routinization of testing. And when you start testing lots of pregnancies for lots of conditions, you start creeping further into eugenic territory.

There are no easy solutions to any of these questions. Some may very well prove to be unanswerable and some parties will remain dissatisfied if we do manage to come up with some answers. It will involve vigorous and at times contentious debates among multiple viewpoints, and lots of people convinced that they are so damned right and why the hell can’t everybody else see that? But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be taking on the challenge. We may wind up with less than perfect answers, but they will be better than what we are doing now. The practice of genetic counseling demands it and patients deserve no less.

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*- Another source of confusion here is the distinction between the false positive rate and a false positive result. The false positive rate is the number of pregnancies that do not have a condition but test positive. Thus, a lab can accurately claim that cfDNA for microdeletions has a false positive rate below 1%. You can see why a patient with a positive result might misinterpret that to mean there is over a 99% chance that her baby does indeed have a microdeletion. On the other hand, a false positive result is one specific patient’s test result which incorrectly indicates that a condition is present. Thus a patient who has a positive microdeletion result has an 80-90% chance that her baby does not have a microdeletion. Lord have mercy! You can see why pregnant patients might be confused. Then try to sort through all that while experiencing the joys of hyperemesis, or if you are a non-English speaking immigrant from a village in Central America working through an interpreter, or if you are also trying to figure out at about the same time the meaning of your rubella result, your HIV status, your nuchal thickness scan, and the results of your carrier testing.

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by | September 27, 2021 · 12:40 PM

The American Plan: The Incarceration and Forced Treatment of “Good Time Girls”

this poster features an apparently average and conservatively dressed woman who might also pose a threat. Featured in the poster is the warning to all servicemen that 'She May Look Clean–But pick-ups, 'good-time girls' and prostitutes spread syphilis and gonorrhea. Publisher information at bottom of poster.

 

Every girl under supervision, we know where she works, who her friends are, and how she puts in her time….While the girls are in the hospital, we grade her mentally, and make a detailed social investigation… Her mental grading helps us in determining what she can do… We are locking up just as many feeble-minded girls as we can.  – Katharine Ostrander, Michigan State Board of Health, Director of Social Services (1919)

I recently became aware of a little known chapter in 20th century American history known as The American Plan, a chapter so creepy it could have been written by Margaret Atwood. While it is not directly connected to genetic counseling, the usual focus of this blog, as you will see it does intersect with eugenics. I feel it is shocking enough that it should be brought to the attention of the blog’s Good Readers; I suspect that many will be as stunned and surprised as I was. Most of what I have to say is drawn from Scott W. Stern’s 2018 book The Trials of Nina McCall – Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Plan To Imprison “Promiscuous” Women. Please note that in the posting I am using the  historical vocabulary of that time period to capture the zeitgeist of America in the first part of the 20th century.

The US entry into the First World War resulted in the drafting of nearly 3 million men into the military. Draftees were administered, among other things, an IQ test and a physical exam for social diseases, as sexually transmitted infections (STIs) were euphemistically labeled at the time (even the US Surgeon General was not allowed to say “syphilis” on a radio broadcast). The results were alarming – a substantial number of draftees had a very low IQ and a high incidence of social diseases. We looked like a nation whose men were sex-crazed morons (“moron” was a supposedly objective scientific category based on low IQ score). Perhaps many readers are thinking “Well, yeah, men haven’t changed much in the last 100 years”.

The Enemy in Your Pants – Mother Jones

Military and political leaders were concerned that the US fighting force would be defeated by its own diseases. To combat social disease the US government enacted The American Plan, based on similar plans from European countries. Some readers may be familiar with the cheesy posters warning soldiers in both World Wars of the dangers of venereal diseases but these smile-inducing graphics belie a dark side to some of the strategies employed by The American Plan. In an attempt to “protect” the troops from syphilis and the like, a range of laws and policies on the federal, state, and local levels were enacted that gave authorities and even some civilian entities almost blanket permission to arrest, isolate, examine, treat, and reform anyone suspected of spreading social diseases. Although the initial focus was intended to be communities near military camps, it soon spread to many towns and cities throughout the country, regardless of their proximity to military facilities. Every state and hundreds of cities and towns passed nearly identical versions of American Plan laws.

Multicolor poster with white lettering, depicting a woman standing outside a bar or dance hall. The woman has blond hair and wears a short-sleeved steel blue dress, pink bracelet, and blue ring. She has a dark red purse tucked between her arm and body, freeing up her hands to hold matches and light the cigarette dangling from her mouth. Her attractive features are hardened by her eyebrows coming together, as in anger, and a slight snarl on her lips. Initial title words at top of poster, remainder overlap woman's midsection. Artist's name in lower right corner. VDgraphic-25 appears in lower left corner.

Essentially, any woman suspected – not convicted – of being a prostitute, engaging in “promiscuous behavior,” premarital sex, or other “suspicious behavior” could be forced to undergo an invasive pelvic exam, almost always by a male physician. If the physician decided that the the person had evidence of a a social disease, they could be confined to an institution – a jail, a hospital, a “reformatory,” depending on local conditions. Whatever building or camp was used, the women were incarcerated, plain and simple. Once incarcertated they were forced to undergo largely ineffective, painful, and toxic treatments with a mercury- or arsenic-based regimen. This even though diagnosis was rarely definitive unless the person had flagrant disease; indeed, some women were diagnosed as being “slightly infected,” whatever that means. For good measure, many were also given IQ tests, and if they scored low enough they could be forced to undergo sterilization under some state eugenic laws. There was also a profit motive to incarcerating women; the Federal Government provided money to the states, and states passed the funds on to local authorities, with the amount depending on how many women were detained. 

 

Beware of Chance Acquaintances, American Society for Social Hygiene VD Poster | David Pollack Vintage Posters

The policy was not limited to brothels and known prostitutes, who in fact usually had a low incidence of social diseases. Women of any age were forced into the program, including young teens and even pre-teens. It is astounding what could be labeled as a “suspicious behavior.” One woman was detained because a vengeful former boss reported her as sexually suspect after she quit her job. Another was detained after she volunteered as a witness to a car theft. Another was detained because she was on a date with a man who was drinking alcohol. Think about this. A woman might be flirting with a couple of guys in a dance hall or soda shop or go out for a drink on her own, or just be walking down the street in Anytown, USA in a “suspicious” manner and she could be forced to undergo a painful pelvic exam by a physician, confined to a treatment center for an indefinite period based on faulty testing and disease criteria, and then made to endure painful, debilitating and largely ineffective treatment until such time that the authorities had decided that she was cured and socially reformed. These incarcerations helped shape the modern American women’s carceral system, which currently has nearly a quarter million women within its walls.

Retro WW II Loose Women Loaded With VD Venereal Disease 45 Auto World War Poster | eBay

It was felt that if women were reformed they would not return to their former loose life styles. Reform usually meant making them clean, cook, sew, and perform other activities – mostly to maintain the institutions where they were being incarcerated – that were thought be be appropriate for proper women. Authorities had the power to hold the women for days, weeks, or months until such time as it was decided that they were deemed medically and socially fit to re-enter society. Even after release, women could be required to check in with institutional directors for permission if they wanted to move, get a job, or even to get married. Some directors asked employers to monitor released inmates’ behavior and report suspected relapses.

The American Plan continued to be actively enforced for ~30 years until the end of WWII and the advent of antibiotic treatment, though there are reports of abuses until the 1960s (in 1965, the then 18 year old writer and radical feminist Andrea Dworkin was forced to undergo a painful pelvic exam under New York’s American Plan law when she was arrested at an anti-war demonstration). Not to worry anybody, but these laws are still on the books in most states and cities. 

Black women, Native American women, immigrant, and Latinx women were disproportionately singled out. Non-white women were said to have the racial characteristics of excessive promiscuity and – according to the Surgeon General of the United States! – to be anatomically susceptible to spreading social diseases. The laws were written as largely gender-neutral but men were only rarely singled out, and then usually just treated rather than detained for a prolonged period. The laws glossed over how men can transmit social diseases to other men; homosexuality was not something to acknowledge or discuss and, besides, it was already illegal in most states.

Because many records have been destroyed, the exact number of women subjected to this practice is not known, but at minimum it involved tens of thousands of women. Despite all this enforcement, the architects and enforcers of The American Plan were never able to demonstrate that it was effective in lowering the incidence of social diseases.

There is no fun in V.D." Anti-venereal disease poster, c. 1945.: PropagandaPosters

The American Plan was not some dark government secret known only to an elite few insiders. It was widely reported and supported in newspapers and politicians of all bents, including Presidents, condoned it. Supporters – men and women alike – could be found across the political spectrum but there was particularly strong support among Progressives and liberals – the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Bar Association, Eleanor Roosevelt, Earl Warren (who would go on to become a liberal Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court), the League of Women Voters, to name a few. Some of these supporters criticized some specifics of the American Plan but they were not opposed to The American Plan itself. At the other end of the spectrum, Eliot Ness, he of The Untouchables, was actively involved in carrying out the plan at one point, as was J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. They all pretty much thought they were doing good for society and helping women. Many of the key players in developing and carrying out The American Plan also subscribed to eugenic beliefs and were members of eugenics societies. A source of consistent and significant financial support for many of the activities, beyond governments, was John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the Rockefeller Foundation (the Rockefellers also helped fund the Eugenics Record Office). Even when law suits were brought by women who had been incarcerated, the decisions sometimes supported a woman’s claims in a few cases but the legal validity of The American Plan itself was never questioned by the courts. 

Racist, sexist, rude, crude and dishonest: the golden age of Madison Avenue .. 'because innocence is sexier than you think' | London Evening Standard | Evening Standard

 

The primary non-governmental agency driving The American Plan was the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA). Formed in 1913 with Rockefeller funding, the ASHA essentially crafted the details of The American Plan, provided expert advice to the government, employed undercover agents in cities to hunt out suspicious locations and field workers who would work with local police in coordinating arrests, and crafted model legislation that was adopted almost verbatim by most states. The organization also pushed for enforcement of American Plan laws beyond primarily protecting soldiers to protecting the general public. ASHA has since changed its name and is now called the American Sexual Health Association, and its activities and goals are quite different and perhaps more noble than those of its predecessor. However, its website makes no acknowledgement of this shameful history and has only this to say about its past:

“ASHA was founded as the American Social Hygiene Association in 1914 by a group of public health reformers committed to attacking an undesirable social condition–venereal disease, or VD–that they believed could be improved through medical and educational means. The shame and reluctance to talk about sexuality was now weakened enough so that the public was at least generally aware of the dangers posed by VD. This was the first social marketing effort to mix physical and moral fitness for prevention of VD.”

I am in no position to speak for the ASHA but if I were a member I would want my organization to be more honest, open, and reflective about its past.

Propaganda and the law of unintended consequences < Yale School of Medicine

I am reluctant to draw lessons from history and I am hesitant about judging the past through the lens of the present. With such widespread and enthusiastic support for The American Plan, if we were alive then many of us might have been swept up by the social currents of the times and supported it in some fashion, just like many of us would probably have embraced some aspects of eugenics. We are not morally superior to our ancestors and we are all products of our times. That being said, this was a gross injustice carried out in the name of “doing good.” It needs to be more widely known and subjected to scholarly investigation and a national dialogue, at the very least.

When you are so convinced that you are doing good it can blind you to your actions’ downsides. As I’ve written about before, genetic counselors are particularly susceptible to “do-goodism.” What looks progressive to one generation can look awfully repressive to another generation. When we seek to do good, we should do so with humility, an eye to history, and a keen awareness that when we try to do good we can wind up doing a lot of bad.

For an interview with author Scott Stern about The American Plan on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p0LjJ8tTh0

For a podcast about this topic, see the History This Week Podcast: https://play.acast.com/s/d9768fa0-a79a-4ead-9102-f965e8a470bc/82177119-c36c-4a67-b906-94ae38000416

Unrelated to the above posting, I recently had a thirst for a dose of spirituality, a thirst perhaps driven by the existential wear and tear of the last few years. I am not a religious person – I am pretty much a we-are-all-star-stuff kind of person – but I do derive a deep satisfaction from contemplating the magic of life and the incomprehensible complexity of the universe. Which got me to thinking of the Indigenous Canadian singer Buffy Sainte-Marie’s 1969 song “God Is Alive, Magic is Afoot.” The lyrics are taken from a section of the poet Leonard Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers. As far as I know, Leonard Cohen never recorded it as a song. Incidentally, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s music was unofficially blacklisted in the US for a period because of her anti-war activities and her involvement with the Native American political movement. Honestly, the song doesn’t make much cognitive sense to me, but it does make intuitive sense. In particular, the closing lines always give a jolt to my sense of wonder:

And mind itself is magic coursing through the flesh
And flesh itself is magic dancing on a clock
And time itself, the magic length of God

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by | November 18, 2020 · 10:27 PM

What A Mess

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.   – Apocryphal quote, likely incorrectly attributed to George Bernard Shaw

A South Carolina court recently granted a summary judgment in favor of the defendant in the case of Williams v. Quest Diagnostics, Inc., Athena Diagnostics, Inc,  ADI Diagnostics, Inc.  The ruling is particularly relevant to the genetics profession because it concerns the potential legal implications of the classification of genetic variants.

This legal odyssey began nearly 5 years ago but the clinical story began 14 years ago, and was first reported here on The DNA Exchange. Briefly, Amy Williams, the plaintiff, filed a suit in 2016 on behalf of her deceased son alleging negligence on the part of Athena (now owned by Quest) when in 2007 it classified a variant in the SCN1A gene as a Variant of Uncertain Significance (VUS) in her son who had a seizure disorder. SCN1A pathogenic variants are diagnostic for Dravet syndrome.

Multiple specialists were involved in the child’s care, but it seems from the medical records that none of them were actually aware of the genetic test results. The ordering physician could not recall having seen the report and the treating physicians never received a copy of the report or a communication from the ordering physician about the result, even though a copy of the report is in the medical records. Consequently, her son’s treating physician kept him on carbamazepine, a sodium channel blocker that is contra-indicated in children with Dravet syndrome. Sadly, he died about 6 months later, likely due to the contraindicated medication. Ms. Williams did not find out about the SCN1A result until nearly 7 years after the report was issued, and then only after a genetic counselor who was sifting through the records found a note from 2008 referring to an SCN1A VUS (for a fuller description of this saga, I refer you to the excellent articles written by Turna Ray, a journalist for Genome Web).

The lab’s defense rested on a legal technicality of the statute of limitations. Per South Carolina law, litigation cannot be brought against a healthcare provider if the offense took place more than 3 years prior to the filing. The lab’s lawyers argued, and in 2018 the South Carolina Supreme Court agreed, that a lab qualifies as a healthcare provider under state law. Subsequently, Judge Margaret Seymour, the judge who presided over the original case (and who displayed an excellent grasp of the genetic and legal issues), found that several of the plaintiff’s claims were “comprised of allegations sounding in both medical malpractice and ordinary negligence” and allowed the matter to move to discovery for the purpose of determining what caused Athena’s laboratory staff to misclassify the gene variant. Ms. Williams and her lawyers proceeded with the case based on “claims for wrongful death, survival, negligent misrepresentation, constructive fraud, and violation of the South Carolina Unfair Trade Practices Act.” Following discovery, the defendants requested a summary judgment to dismiss the case (in a summary judgment, either a plaintiff or a defendant can assert that the facts in the case are not in question and ask the judge to make a decision on the case without a full trial). 

Judge Seymour based her decision on the statute of limitations ruling by the South Carolina Supreme Court and the likely inability to prove proximate cause (i.e., that the VUS classification led to continued treatment with carbamazepine which then caused the child’s death), and dismissed the case: “The court concludes that no reasonable jury could find Defendants erred in classifying Decedent’s variant as a VUS, or that any misclassification was the result of nonmedical, administrative, ministerial, or routine care. Defendant’s motion for summary judgment is granted as to this issue.”

In an unfortunately cruel twist, Ms. Williams and her lawyers may owe Quest and its lawyers ~$140,000 in court sanctions imposed after some personal emails and other documents that, in my view likely had little bearing on the facts of the case, were deleted or improperly withheld because of less than stellar legal representation. The defendant’s lawyers offered to drop the costs stemming from sanctions if Ms. Williams agreed not to discuss the case in public forums and to discourage others from doing so. However, she did not agree to the proposal and remains firm in her belief that her son’s story needs to be discussed in public for the benefit of the public and the genetics profession, even in the face of potential financially ruin.

Was Athena’s original variant classification appropriate? Published case reports at the time the interpretation was first issued suggested that the SCN1A variant could be likely pathogenic (that was not the common terminology at the time), one of which was co-authored by Athena staff. Yet comments in the test report state there is an “absence of published studies correlating these variant(s) with clinical presentation and/or pathology.” In April of 2009, 2 years after the report was issued, Athena reclassified the variant as pathogenic, although they cited no new evidence beyond what was available when the report was first issued. Specialists in variant classification, who understand the intricacies of variant classification far better than I do, have weighed in and most have argued that Athena’s original classification of a VUS was appropriate for the knowledge available in 2007. Currently there are two entries for this variant in ClinVar, neither of which make an attempt at classification. I am not about to get into a debate with good scientists who know a heck of a lot more than I do about variant classification. I will say this, though, as someone who orders genetic testing every day, I rely heavily on labs to interpret variants and to let me know when there is in a result that might be grayer than ordinary. Especially in a case where a treatment decision with life and death implications hinges on a test result, I would expect the lab to explain their justification for the interpretation and to have made it clear in writing in the report. A phone call to the ordering provider wouldn’t hurt either, to be sure that the critical information and any uncertainty is clearly communicated.

Just as egregious, Ms. Williams should not have learned of a genetic test result almost 7 years after it was issued, and then only almost incidentally. Nor does it appear that the physicians who cared for the child were aware of the updated classification or communicated it to one another – not surprising, given that they were apparently unaware of the original report. Had she been notified in a timely manner, she may have initiated a discussion of why the variant was classified this way and if the evidence was strong enough to be the basis for treatment decisions. Of course this burden should not be on the patient but it could have offered another opportunity for further exploring treatment decisions based on the result. Many of us in the medical field, including me, have been critical of the requirement of the 21st Century CURES Act to notify patients of test results within 24 hours of when they are ready. My grumbling aside, Amy Williams and her son would have greatly benefited from being notified of her son’s result 24 hours after it were available. Does it have to take an Act of Congress to ensure that healthcare providers are responsible communicators with their patients?

In my view, nothing good came of this case in terms of the reputation of the genetics community, though of course nowhere near as bad as the devastating effects for Amy Williams and her son. To resurrect the line from the Captain’s speech in the movie “Cool Hand Luke“, what we have here is failure to communicate. Basically, a child may have died prematurely because of poor communication between the lab and care providers, between care providers, between care providers and the patient’s mother, and between the lab and the patient’s mother. Everybody lost and nobody won, even if Athena/Quest won from the perspective of not having to pay damages.

Will we now become better at communicating results to patients? Perhaps the CURES Act will help some. But as genetic testing expands well beyond the genetics community, communication about the implications of test results will likely still be deficient in many instances, in part because many non-specialists who order genetic tests are not particularly adept at interpreting them. Furthermore, although it’s hats’ off to ClinVar and other collaborative efforts for classify variants, variant classification will continue to be an Achilles’ heel of genome analysis because there is just no profit in it and it can be so damned complicated. 

I look back on this story and feel a knot in my stomach.

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by | October 18, 2020 · 6:42 PM

When Good Genetic Counselors Are Bad Role Models

I will be retiring at the end of this year. In a natural reflex triggered at career’s end, I have been reflecting on my 37+ years as a genetic counselor. Among other things, I have been pondering what traits make for a good genetic counselor, what makes us better or worse at our jobs. So far, I have not come up with brilliant insights that would vastly improve professional practice.

Except maybe this one – we are sometimes not so good at asking for help from one another in our workplaces or saying “No” to more work when our workloads are already overwhelming. We, who are so dedicated to helping others, are not so good at helping ourselves.

Many of us are guilty of this sin to varying degrees and in different ways. Sure I’ll see that last minute add-on at 4:30 today even though I  came in early and had planned on leaving at 3:30. If I come in to the office over the weekend, I can catch up on my dictations. I can’t refuse the last minute ask by my boss for an analysis of clinic data over the last 3 years for a presentation she is giving tomorrow, even though I have a full patient load. That patient has a busy schedule; I told him I would come in an hour early to accommodate his schedule. Or worst of all, coming in to work when you’re sick because “it’s just so busy”; just what the colleagues need, a super-spreader (maybe one good thing that has come out of the awful COVID epidemic is that people may now be more willing to use their PTO when they are sick).

Part of the reason we are so willing to overwork ourselves is that genetic counselors are uniformly compassionate people. We care deeply about our patients and we want to do our best to help them through difficult times. If we didn’t, we would never have made it past the gatekeepers of the profession, the ones who decide who does or doesn’t get admitted to or stay in the training programs. Compassion and empathy were in the vows we took when we wed ourselves to the genetic counseling profession (back in the day, we OGC’s – Original Genetic Counselors – also took a vow of poverty but fortunately nowadays that vow has been dropped from the list).

But I think there is another reason that contributes to our inability to just say no – professional insecurity and professional self-image. Deep down, we like to think of ourselves as superheroes. We don’t want to admit to ourselves that we are not indestructible superheroes capable of withstanding the forces that attack us and test our strength as we fly to the rescue of our patients, or for others to think we are vulnerable. Asking for help is our kryptonite.

 

We worry too that our genetic counseling colleagues will think the less of us if we say to them “You know, I am starting to fall behind in my work. Could someone else see one of my patients today?” Or that we might look less than compassionate if we say to a patient or a referring provider “I would ordinarily squeeze in this last minute referral. But there just isn’t enough room in my schedule today to accommodate your request.” These kinds of responses can gnaw at your image of your professional self and make you feel inferior. After all, you look around and your other colleagues seem pretty busy too but they aren’t saying no to extraordinary demands. Maybe I am not as a good a genetic counselor as they are. So instead, you wind up sucking it up and taking on the extra work.

This is an insidious frame of mind. It contributes to professional burnout and compassion fatigue. After a while, you just can’t take it anymore. Which nearly  happened to me some 5 or 6 years ago when I came within a heartbeat of walking away from the profession. One of my great strengths as a genetic counselor is that I am incredibly efficient. Which is also my great weakness; my ability to get things done led to greater workloads as it seemed that I could absorb nearly any workload. I finally told my boss that either I get more help immediately or I’m outta’ here. A gamble, but it paid off. I got the help I needed lickety-split and today I work with 3 terrific genetic counseling colleagues. I became a more human superhero for having done it.

The problem propagates itself across generations when you realize that we, consciously or unconsciously, are role models for younger counselors and students. They see us burdening ourselves with ridiculous work loads. Even if we tell them to not do as we have done, they subconsciously get the message that this is the way good genetic counselors are supposed to be. They admire us and want to, if not exactly be clones of us, fashion themselves into some approximate image of us based mostly on our actions, not our words. Unfortunately, the role models put up a damned good front.

Sure, some of this stems from management, who unfailingly claim there is a budget crisis and who seem to have an ingrained belief that there is one too many staff around here or that more patients can miraculously be shoehorned into a schedule. That part of the blame is on them and their out-of-clinical-touch mindthink. But a goodly part of the blame is on ourselves. We will never get help if we don’t ask for it. And we can start by asking for help from each other. Even if your colleagues are just as busy and can’t help you out, it becomes an opportunity for everyone to acknowledge or realize that we don’t have to be the Justice League of Genetic Counseling, always ready to save the genetic universe. We are, at the end of the day, imperfect humans trying to make super-human efforts. If we can’t always save the day, we are not failures. If we embrace this, we will be better genetic counselors.

 

On another topic altogether, with the help of Emily Singh I have created a pair of graphics to reinforce the message that masks are symbols of compassion, not repression, and to urge my American readers to vote in the upcoming election. Remember – many superheroes wear masks. This is one way we can help save the world without adding to our workload.

 

 

 

 

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