Soraya de Chadarevian, a professor in the UCLA Department of History and the Institute for Society and Genetics at UCLA, has been awarded a two-year grant of about $300,000 from the National Science Foundation for her research project, "Heredity under the Microscope: A History of Human Chromosomes." The grant will provide her with a 50 percent teaching release as well as travel and research funds that will enable her to conduct further research in this area and write a book.
De Chadarevian’s interests lie in the history of the biomedical sciences from the 19th Century to the present, particularly during the period following World War II. Her project aims to understand what factors played a role in the evolution of research on human chromosomes and the cellular structures carrying genetic information. The historical accounts of postwar genetics mainly surround molecular biology, whereas the study of human chromosomes has been neglected. In an effort to enrich the postwar genetics literature, de Chadarevian seeks to reconstruct the period when human heredity mattered and genetic knowledge was embraced, debated and rejected by tracing the history of human chromosomes along with previous techniques and images that were packaged with them.
