Addressing Eugenics in the Biology Curriculum at Yale
Tenzin*, a junior at Yale, writes about progress towards an anti-eugenic curriculum intervention for the Yale Undergraduate Biology curriculum.
*Tenzin Dhondup ‘26 (he/him) is an undergraduate studying the History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health, Spanish, and Global Health.
Each year, hundreds of students file into Yale’s lecture halls, moving through the four introductory biology courses. As a student in these classes, I sat alongside other peers starting their STEM or pre-med journeys. As a student, I listened as professors celebrated scientific achievements and their achievers. Yet, amidst their praise, I felt and knew that so much context was missing.
We learned about scientists and their discoveries but not the complex legacies of their work—how science has been used to justify and uphold social inequality. Apart from a single lecture slide in the final class of the sequence, which briefly dismissed eugenics as pseudoscience, the biology curriculum barely engaged with the broader societal impacts of the science we studied.
For example, we studied CRISPR and its incredible potential in editing genomes and preventing certain diseases. Yet we didn’t critically explore why scientists have sought to use the same innovation to attempt to engineer human traits like height, strength, or “intelligence”—traits that perpetuate ideas of the “perfect human form” or are socially constructed, such as intelligence.
Another example is genome-wide association studies (GWAS). In class, we learned about its application to associate traits, like the short-leggedness of dogs, with specific genomic sites. While we acknowledged GWAS’s limitations as a correlational tool, we didn’t grapple with its broader implications. Currently, scientists have attempted to engage with it – using genomic data sets that overrepresent Europeans — to find the correlation of educational attainment and specific sites on the genome. In those lecture halls, room simply was not made to ask questions about consequence: why are scientists using the same techniques we are learning to reify and justify social categories and inequalities like educational attainment?
Thankfully, past biology students like Kelly Long (Molecular Biology ’23), Gemma Yoo (Ecology ’23), and Emme Magliato (Evolutionary Biology ’23) shared these concerns and recognized these gaps. They created the Eugenics and the Sciences Guide. In it, they highlight opportunities within the curriculum to critically engage with the legacies of science—not to call out “bad science”, but to encourage critical engagement with science and society in order to think more critically about the legacies that underlie scientific discovery and application.
Now, we (Tenzin Dhondup ’26, Modupe Karimi ’26, and Hanifah Ouro-Sama ’26) are building on their work. We’re collaborating with the introductory biology professors and current students to expand the biology curriculum. We hope to make the curriculum more attentive to the role of science in society and how society shapes scientific priorities, advancement and discovery.
We see our anti-eugenic intervention in the course not as a means of disruption - rather, as a means of elaboration and contextualization. The current objectives of the biology curriculum are:
You will learn scientific concepts and experimental approaches
You will learn how to analyze and interpret scientific data
You will learn how to read a scientific paper
You will learn how to design and write a research proposal
If we can learn the methods and concepts of biology, why can’t we also question their societal implications? Why can’t we discuss the ethics of scientific inquiries, like using GWAS to study “educational attainment”? If we analyze data, why not also interrogate the biases inherent in data collection and interpretation? If we design research proposals, why not situate our investigations within broader societal contexts and their consequences?
We are excited to have the support of the course coordinator and to continue the work of Kelly, Gemma, and Emme as we imagine what more looks like for other students in the sciences.