Q & A with Elise Burton: On genetics and nationalist projects

This conversation is published as part of the Counter Academy for Arab Journalism program, where we work with writers from the region on developing their journalism skills. The one-year program is offered by the Febrayer network of independent Arab media, which includes Al-Jumhuriya, Mada Masr, Ma3azef, Megaphone and Sowt.

Are we humans all the same, or all different? Can any single, rigid set of categories capture the dynamism of our diversity? Since the emergence of genetics as a quantitative field in 19th-century Europe, geneticists grappled with questions revolving around classifying human biodiversity. Whether aboard the ships of faded empires or in well-lit conference halls, in reclusive aristocratic manors or in today’s experimental labs, genuine curiosities, constructed imaginaries, and at times blatant prejudices, fused with genetic data to suggest different, and competing, narratives.

In the Middle East, the scientific technocratic elites were also integrated in global networks of scientists, Elise Burton tells us, and their work co-shaped discourses of sameness and difference during transformative political periods in the past century. In a recent book titled Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity (SUP, 2021), Burton builds on her training in Middle Eastern studies and genetics to present an original history of genetic research in the region, from colonial anthropology and medicine to recent genome sequencing projects. Mada Masr spoke to Burton, who is a historian of the life sciences at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto, to ask her about the book, how Nasserist Pan-Arabism shaped the study of sickle cell disease in the Middle East, the ways Turkish nationalism reframed genetic studies to consolidate control over territory, and the genetics debates between Arab Nationalist and Phoenicianist currents in early 20th-century Lebanon, among other topics.

Mada Masr: How would you introduce yourself?

Elise Burton: I would identify myself as a historian of the life sciences. I specialize very much in that, but am also interested in broader questions about evolutionary biology and medicine, and how human biology relates to questions of nationalism and race in the Middle East. In that sense, I am a product of my undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley, where I both majored in Middle Eastern Studies and was trained as a geneticist.

MM: In your recent book, Genetic Crossroads, you use “Genetics” as an umbrella term for multiple methods through which human biodiversity has been studied. What did you mean by Genetics with a capital G?

EB: What I really mean is the scientific study of hereditary traits. Over time, the methods for studying those traits were originally limited to human variations that could be measured by bare eyes, like the color of skin or hair, and especially took off with measuring the size and shape of body parts, such as the skull, head and face, as in craniometry. Those early studies were the domain of physical anthropologists. Even though we might look historically and say, “well, these folks are not the same as geneticists,” the questions they were trying to answer through measuring traits were very similar to some of the questions that geneticists have today.

Once we get to the 1920’s, we start seeing the crystallization of Genetics in terms of the study of molecular-level traits, be it with the study of blood types, or later, of inherited diseases such as sickle cell, which could be detected at the level of blood proteins. At that point, you have medical scientists who are participating more and more in genetic research. The book ends with the transition to Genetics as we know it today, which we commonly understand through the direct sequencing of DNA, something that only became possible at a widespread level at the end of the 1970s and 1980s. It's only at that point that we start having scientists who are specifically trained as geneticists. We have all of these scholars and practitioners involved in what we would now understand to be genetic research, and I am using “Genetics” as an umbrella term that I think reflects the historical development of the scientific field.

MM: A common theme in the book is the scientific “production of ethnicity” as it relates to human biodiversity. This might sound confusing. Isn’t biodiversity often described as naturally existing and only awaiting discovery and classification?

EB: In Genetics, data collected from individuals only becomes meaningful in relation to the genetic data of others, be they other individuals or groups. Comparing similarities and differences in inherited traits has to be done when studying biodiversity, and that is not only true for humans, but for all species. When I was studying frogs in Australia as an undergraduate, we were identifying where the frogs came from in terms of location, along a certain creek for example.

The particular challenge of human population genetics relates to the many possible ways individuals and groups could be classified. Geographically, one might select a city, a whole country, or even a continent. Simultaneously, those geographic categories might sometimes be conflated with socially constructed ones such as ethnicity, nationality, religion, race, language, or tribal membership. There's always possibly a legitimate reason to use one category or another based on the question that you're trying to answer as a scientist, but the decision is never an innocent one. This is a statistical science: depending on how you define and select groups, you're going to end up with different frequencies of whatever inherited traits you're investigating, and the statistical results are also going to depend on which other groups the first one is compared to. So it's not that the DNA of individuals is instantly changing when you make these decisions — in that sense of DNA, diversity is natural. Rather, it is about the choices of categories and comparisons you make, and the fact that those decisions have a profound impact on the results you generate and the many ways they could be interpreted.

MM: Before we delve into specific regions of the Middle East, I would like to ask about a narrative on genetic knowledge production that you also seem to be deconstructing in the book. What did you want to highlight about the dynamics between the scientific technocratic elites in the Middle East and in Europe and North America?

EB: When I started working on this project, I sensed that there is yet another one of those example narratives where the science was developed by Europeans or Westerners and later picked up by Middle Eastern technocrats. That is something I try to push back on. Local knowledge provided by scientists and community leaders in the Middle East was important to early genetic studies in the region. Other scholars have done very interesting work on the histories of anthropology, race science and eugenics in the Middle East, but these works often analyzed the impact of local actors in their immediate countries and suggested that they were sort of applying what they had learned from Europeans in a local context. There was little focus on what their significance might have been in the other direction, how they might have had a strong impact on the way that European scientists understood genetic phenomena. These actors [scientists in the Middle East] have been deeply integrated into global networks of scientists, and the work they have been doing is having effects beyond the region itself.

MM: As to global and local histories, and moving on to Egypt, how did nationalist narratives interplay with genetic studies in the country?

EB: In the Egyptian case, there were questions during the first half of the 20th century on whether only Coptic Christians represent the “pure descendants” of the indigenous ancient Egyptian civilization, and whether Muslim Arabs are related to that ancient civilization or just represent invaders from Arabia. So, there was a tendency among European geneticists to come to Egypt and study Copts under a strong assumption that they were going to be genetically different from Muslim Egyptians. No matter how many studies they did, they could never actually find a genetic difference; but they kept saying, “Oh, we need a bigger sample, we need a bigger sample.” During the same period, a group of Muslim Egyptian scientists managed to do a survey on both Coptic and Muslim soldiers in the Egyptian army, and they reported that on the basis of a huge sample, there is actually no real genetic difference between Copts and Muslims, and all Egyptians share a mixed ancestry that is neither solely Pharoanic nor solely Arab. Their interpretation of results in turn supported the kind of Egyptian nationalism that was prominent at the time — pre-Nasser — with a distinct emphasis on the uniqueness of an Egyptian shared ancestry.

MM: Did the emergence of Nasserist pan-Arabism in the 1950’s have an impact on these types of studies in the region?

EB: Yes. One layer of analysis that I want to add in here relates to the international scientific debates that were also happening across the history of genetics at the time. For example, sickle cell disease was initially racialized and thought of as a result of African ancestry. But then competing hypotheses related to [Darwinian] natural selection were emerging to suggest that infectious diseases might have an evolutionary impact upon inherited genetic traits. Increasing studies reported that there are groups in the Middle East [outside the African continent] who had sickle cell disease, and that was a surprise at the time. There was a lot of pushback against this environmental rather than racialized explanation, including from American and British scientists who suggested that migratory patterns [rather than the environment] might explain the incidence of sickle cell in the region. We now take for granted that the environmental explanation holds true, and that malaria did have an evolutionary effect on predisposition to sickle cell,^[1] but this was once a fierce global scientific debate. During the same period, and we are here talking about the 1950’s and 1960’s, pan-Arabism was affecting how people understood what Arab identity and a shared Arab ancestry were supposed to mean. In Lebanon, for example, scientists at the American University of Beirut, which generally worked in a pan-Arab-leaning atmosphere at the time, merged the evolutionary narrative with migration histories to provide an explanation for the differences in recorded sickle cell disease patterns among religious communities in the country. In doing so, they wanted to circumvent another explanation that would use these patterns in an attempt to associate specific religious identities with indigeneity [which would conflict with pan-Arab perspectives].

MM: In Turkey, it seems there was a kind of “acrobatic highlighting of difference” in genetic studies, especially with respect to the Hatay region and the Kurds. How did that take place?

EB: There was a strong emphasis on national categories in Turkey and Iran, especially during the early years of state formation during the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Turkish and Iranian governments were very concerned about consolidating their authority and [feared] losing territory to competing nationalist movements that might become separatist. Their governing strategies relied on an imposition of a single national-ethnic-linguistic identity that was supposed to unify the population. Genetic research in this period reflects those political and social conditions. Turkish and Iranian scientists often talked about the genetic traits of Turks or Iranians as a whole, and then tried to compare those national-level results to those of other nations, such as comparing the frequencies of blood types in Iran to those in France, England or Japan, for example. There was also another foreign policy goal behind these comparisons, so that Iranians and Turks should be considered racially white, like Europeans, and accordingly given the same kind of diplomatic respect that European nations gave to each other.

In Hatay, there was a territorial dispute between Syria and Turkey. In order to lay claim to the land, Turkish nationalists wanted to carve off certain groups of the Arabic-speaking population and suggest that while they might speak Arabic, their ancestry or biological identity might not be Arab. One of the groups they focused on was the Alawites. For the initial purposes of what was going to be an ethnic census to decide who would control this territory, there was a strong campaign to suggest that Alawites are distinct from other Arabs. The justification had in part to do with suggesting that Alawites are the descendants of the Hittites,^[2] and hence have a shared ancestry with the Turkish people. Yet, Alawties were given a different name, “Eti-Turks,” in an acknowledgement that they’re different from Turkish-speaking Turks. Decades after the dispute was settled, Turkey managed to annex the territory. Now within [the borders of] Turkey, the people that Turkish nationalists tried to embrace as [Eti-]Turks were discriminated against, and an assimilation and language teaching campaign took place in the region. But even decades later, they are still recognizably distinct as a social community.

As for Kurds, there was no special narrative created as in the case of the Alawites as Eti-Turks. There was an active Kurdish separatist movement in the wake of the treaties made immediately after WWI, which gave the Kurds an international recognition as a nation. The Turkish government's aim was to suppress Kurdish rebellions that were resisting the incorporation of territories into Turkey. That is where we see the emergence of terms like “Mountain Turks” to describe Kurds, and the arguments that they are Turkish people in their ancestry. Other arguments also suggested that speaking a different language is again only reflective of a kind of a language replacement theory, and that Kurds are biologically no different from Turks. In early nationwide genetic surveys in Turkey, we know based on reading between the lines and some of the published documentation, that people who would self-identify as Kurds were part of the study; but as Turkish scientists were interpreting the data then, they didn't make reference to this. Instead, Kurdish data was subsumed into the category of a Turkish identity.

MM: In certain scenarios, we see a direct connection between political institutions and genetic studies. We read for example that Afet Inan, who was also one of Ataturk’s adopted daughters, and Yitzek Ben-Zvi, who later became an Israeli president, took part in these types of studies.

EB: Yes, I think the Turkish case is a clear-cut example where the government itself was driving a specific set of practices for genetic studies and had predetermined the sorts of interpretations that it hoped to be able to get. Inan’s education in Geneva and the massive Turkish anthropometry^[3] survey her project relied on were paid for by the Turkish state. She was a very lucky PhD student in this regard [laughs]. The state mobilized more or less all the resources at its disposal to create a clear message for not only domestic consumption, but also foreign, as the research was published in Turkish and French and disseminated in Switzerland. Inan said that the allies she cultivated in the Swiss academic community swallowed the Kamalist story that Turks are Europeans and are indigenous to Anatolia, both elements being key to Turkish political nationalist ideology.

What's distinct about Inan’s case is that because all state resources were mobilized, there was a very coherent narrative created by this genetic research, a much more coherent one than virtually any other case throughout the Middle East.

In the case of Zionism, resources were not directed toward genetic studies up until, I would say, the 1960's. While it is clear that a lot of the discourses created out of early studies are deeply influenced by Zionist ideologies, these studies were often driven by the ideologies and curiosities of individuals. It’s not nearly as much of a consensus as in the [nationalist] Turkish case. We see this in two different chapters of the book, for example, with the case of Yitzak Ben-Zvi, who was a historian, and that of Chaim Sheba, a geneticist who studied favism.^[4] Both Ben-Zvi and Sheba were Zionists, but they did not necessarily interpret genetic data in exactly the same way or drive identical conclusions when it came to the origins of specific religious communities such as the Samaritans. This was a case where, yes, politics were obviously informing what was going on, but there was no profound consensus like the one in the Turkish example.

MM: In Iran, there was a turn after the first half of the 20th century from focusing on one consolidated, nationalist identity to highlighting a spectrum of identities within a wide nationalistic framework. Why do you think this turn took place?

EB: This is one of the surprising results of the historical research that I didn't expect. One thing that is important here is about Aryanism and how it relates to the Iranian national identity. Iranian scientists have had a strong attachment to the idea of Aryanism being a foundational aspect of Iranian identity, and a sensibility of what their ancestry is and how they relate to the land of Iran. That actually remains the case, and you could read papers published by Iranian geneticists as recently as five or 10 years ago that still describe Iranian ancestry as Aryan. Up until around the 1960s, Iranian geneticists represented Iran as a homogeneous land of Aryans. The way they described Iran then shifted to talk about a mosaic of genetically mixed peoples with different proportions of a shared Aryan descent that binds them together in a genetic sense.

As far as what caused this change, there are two main factors I identified, but I do think this point needs further research, and that’s something I am trying to look at in my next book. There were changes in domestic politics that removed certain kinds of logistical barriers to studying certain groups, especially nomadic tribes. For a long time, it had been next to impossible for scientists to really go into areas that were controlled by tribes. In fact it was regarded as suspicious to frequently visit these areas, and a special permission from the government was needed. By the early 1970’s, and following a wave of repression in these areas by the Iranian state, tourists and scientists were visiting, and geneticists were studying ethnic groups associated with tribal identities. Those studies were escalating already in the early 1970s.

I think there is also an external factor that is related to Iranian geneticists’ international networks. So far I've identified an influence by the way genetics has been studied in India. Indian geneticists had a long tradition of studying genetic differences between ethnic and religious groups in South Asia, while at the same time contesting any threats to India’s perceived territorial integrity. They were interested in a “unity in diversity” model, and it seems Iranian geneticists started adopting this approach in the early ‘70s.

MM: Speaking of the “unity in diversity” model, in Lebanon, there are two main episodes in the book relating to Lebanese identity and Phoenicians: one during the interwar period, with a debate between Arab nationalist historian Constantine Zurayk and Jesuit-educated archeologist Maurice Chehab; and another after 2000, with research conducted by a team of local and international geneticists and results that refer to a Lebanese “unity in diversity.” How did these two debates vary?

EB: The early example is a contestation over what Phoenicianism means for Lebanese identity. On one side, you had Phoenicianists who were mostly led by Maronite figures, and on the other you had figures like Zurayk who was trying to say that it is not that the Lebanese are not Phoenicians, but that according to measures of racial classification accepted scientifically back then, Phoenicians are the same race as Arabs, so one can’t argue that there is a biological difference that separates the Lebanese and justifies a separate existence of Mount Lebanon from other Arab states. There was a thread within that earlier debate which suggested that Lebanese people can be unified while also accepting for themselves a combined Arab and Phoenician ancestry, and this underlying thread seems to be what reappeared in the later [post-2000] work on Phoenician DNA. I think what’s different now is that it is occuring after the Lebanese Civil War and following the roles many ideologies of identity, including Phoenicianism and Arabism, played during the war years.

What people remember about Phoenicianism is its association with Maronite militias, and I think that the attempt to make Phoenicianism palatable again as a unifying discourse, as opposed to a highly sectarian one, glosses over this history. There was a desire that in order to overcome present-day political divisions, the most ancient possible ancestor had to be found and to be the source of a unified identity. In the case of Lebanon, their fixation was the Phoenicians. Why not any other approach? They could have equally put out a show about the unity of the Lebanese by emphasizing that they all have mixed ancestry, for example, but they didn't. They chose instead to pick one specific thread of identity and say, “okay, we are all Phoenician, including Muslims, and whatever your religious affiliation is, you might have this Phoenician haplotype^[5], and therefore you are connected to the Phoenician identity.” That was a choice that they made. I also think the way it got picked up by National Geographic and some international scientists reflects not only a kind of naivety about the local meaning of Phoenicianism, but also the West’s preoccupation with using the Middle East to identify its own ancestors: the fixation on Phoenicians and the idea that they are part of the Middle East as the cradle of European civilization; there's also a connection to that.

MM: Kind of an exotic story?

EB: Yes.

MM: The book was published in 2021. It might be a tightrope walk to adopt a critical approach toward science in a period dubbed the “post-truth era.” Was that a challenge? If so, how did you address it?

EB: I do analyze difficult issues in the history of human Genetics, such as unethical sampling practices and problematic interpretations of data, and that is precisely because I take science seriously. I do not want my work to be misinterpreted as anti-science. I was trained in genetics, and I recognize that genetic technologies are immensely powerful tools for knowledge. But like any other tool, genetic technologies don’t work all by themselves, and the data they produce doesn’t speak for itself. Even though there is a common discourse [among scientists] about science having to do with uncovering data, being objective and respecting the evidence, we know that scientists have a lot of decisions that they have to make about the ways they do their research and how they interpret the data. What my historical research is trying to show is how scientists’ working conditions, including the kind of political circumstances that we would argue exist today, are affecting the decisions they have to make in their research. And so, I believe that this critical examination of the decision-making process is actually a very pro-science thing to do. Ultimately, what we want is scientists who reflect on their practices and recognize their role within society. We don't want scientists who are so defensive about their discipline that they become historical denialists about their own discipline.

The final point that I want to make, because I sometimes encounter this attitude from scientists, is that history too is an evidence-based discipline. I certainly could have made a choice to write a book that ignored disturbing details about how genetic research is done, but that would have meant ignoring almost all of the archival evidence that I collected. The results wouldn't have been an accurate history book, but rather a partisan, incomplete account of what happened in the past. I think in our current political climate, this post-truth trend is just as much anti-history as it is anti-science, and we can respond by writing more accurate histories in the same way that we aspire to doing more accurate science.

MM: To end on a lighter note: if you're meeting with a friend in a coffee shop and they tell you that according to a DNA ancestry test they recently took, they're 62.1 percent Vietnamese, 18.7 percent Scottish, and 19.2 percent “unknown.” What would you tell them?

EB: [Laughs] Firstly, this happens to me all the time. Usually I start by trying to explain that those numbers do not mean what they might seem to. Those numbers are not based at all on the sort of intuitive ways that we might understand our ancestry as laypeople. They do not reflect any individual relatives you might have or individual recognizable traits that you inherit. It doesn't mean that 18 percent of your ancestors are Scottish or explain why you have red hair or why you love to eat Vietnamese food. Once my friends recover from the disappointment of learning that, I would go into the broad technical details about how the numbers are generated by human population genetic methods. These are processes of statistical modeling based on the ethnic identification of specific people decided to be reference populations, and the genetic mutation frequencies they have. Samples are run through these probabilistic models to estimate whether certain stretches of DNA are most likely to have come from a certain group of people in a certain location. So results do not mean that 18 percent of your DNA comes from Scottish people either, because these tests actually calculate percentages using a very small [fraction] of the overall genome. One company uses around 300,000 markers to make their ethnicity estimates for example, which might sound like a lot, but considering that a human genome is around 3 billion base pairs, that’s only 0.01 percent.

Another issue is that researchers are constantly collecting more data, and they can change what they think represents a sequence from a specific geographic location. You might get these results today suggesting you're “18.7 percent Scottish,” but a few months from now, when more reference data has been accumulated, results might suggest that you're not Scottish anymore, but rather 18 percent southern Chinese, even as your own DNA didn’t change. It's all based on these processes of statistical meaning-making, which are very complicated for laypeople, and it's often disappointing to hear about.

MM: What are your ongoing projects?

EB: When I was doing the archival research to trace the scientific collaborations that geneticists in the Middle East had, the majority of data I was able to collect referred to connections with geneticists in Europe and North America. But I also came across examples that took place with other parts of Asia, such as collaborations between geneticists in Iran and each of India and Japan. I also became interested in the history of archaeology up till the present in terms of ancient DNA studies, with a focus on Japanese archeological excavations in Iran and Turkey, and other fields such as dermatoglyphics,^[6] which are not covered in my last book. The main project I am currently working on focuses on the intersection of these four countries and is tentatively called “Race across Asia.” Moving forward, the broad questions I am interested in relate to the ways legacies of pan-Asianism, pan-Arabism and pan-Turkism affected scientific collaborations when we look in the Asian direction, and how these collaborations and other fields of research came up with the same sort of narratives that we see in the current book. Are the same kinds of power relations the determining factor behind the narratives, or do we need to account for them in a different way?

^[1] Sickle cell disease results from the distortion of many red blood cells in the body, which affects their ability to transfer oxygen and flow freely in blood vessels. The same inherited genetic mutation that could cause sickle cell can also provide partial resistance to malaria. The environmental explanation suggests that over generations, and through Darwinian natural selection, the prevalence of malaria (an environmental factor) in a specific region can lead to a relative increase in the frequency of the mutation, resulting in resistance to one disease (malaria) but an increase in the prevalence of another (sickle cell). The quantitative correlation between sickle cell and (resistance to) malaria was first investigated during the 1940s, and later studies further supported the environmental explanation for the disease. Sickle cell was first discovered in sub-Saharan African regions, before it was recorded in multiple other geographies, including the Middle East.

^[2] An ancient Anatolian people (second millennium B.C.).

^[3] The measurement of human physical attributes.

^[4] A hereditary condition that can lead to adverse health reactions to compounds found in fava beans, among other foods and drugs. First thought to be confined to specific Mediterranean regions, favism was later identified in other geographies.

^[5] A set of DNA variations that tend to be inherited together.

^[6] A term invented in the 1920s for the scientific study of fingerprint and palm patterning.