Anna Tunlid

The 1948 international congress of genetics in Sweden: People and politics.

The International Congresses have played an important role in the history of genetics. The Eighth International Congress, which in 1948 was held in Sweden, celebrated the conclusion of the war against Nazism and many new decisive scientific advances. It also signaled a hardening of the fight against Lysenkoism, which was growing in strength in the Soviet Union. A rare document is available from the Congress—an amateur film made by a young delegate, Nils Nybom. With its help a living description can be given of the scientific and political melees in which the delegates were involved.

The Establishment of Genetic Counselling in Sweden: 1940–1980

Genetic counselling in Sweden may be traced to the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. A rudimentary form of what we might call genetic counselling today was practised within the state governed Medical Board in the 1940s and 1950s by the scientific advisor Nils von Hofsten. In the 1950s, Jan Arvid Book, professor of medical genetics at Uppsala University, realised the importance of studies in broadly distributed genetic diseases. At the same time as he established a modern laboratory for chromosome analysis, he also held genetic counselling sessions. In Books’s ways of navigating between the older traditions of eugenics and the new movement towards individual choice, there are signs of both continuity and discontinuity in relation to the Swedish eugenic project and population policy of the 1930s and 1940s. When the correct chromosome number of man was demonstrated in 1956, medical genetics as well as genetic counselling changed in many ways. New types of diagnosis could be made and new at-risk groups were identified. The geneticists trained at Book’s department contributed significantly to transfer both laboratory research and counselling activities from the academic setting to the clinic. Development of medical techniques like amniocentesis and prenatal diagnosis further increased the need for more systematised genetic counselling within the healthcare system.