A quiet disquiet settled over the halls of Swedish academia after the mid-1930s, a period when the world recoiled from the stark horrors unveiled by racial ideologies. It was widely believed that the grotesque science of racial biology, so prominent in the early decades of the 20th century with its state-sanctioned institute, had simply vanished, swept away by a collective revulsion. Yet, the truth proves far more intricate and unsettling than a clean disappearance. The story unfolds not as an abrupt cessation, but as a subtle, tenacious survival, a science that merely changed its skin, persisting longer than many would care to admit.
At the heart of this enduring narrative stood the Swedish State Institute for Racial Biology, founded in 1921. Its early years were dominated by Herman Lundborg, a figure whose research, steeped in anthropometric studies and the categorisation of human differences, found troubling resonance and lent legitimacy to the burgeoning Nazi race politics across the Baltic Sea. His work, which claimed to confirm the reality of distinct, hierarchical races, even influenced the chilling racial purity dictates of the SS.
But then came a shift. With Lundborg's retirement in 1935, Gunnar Dahlberg stepped into directorship, embodying a stark contrast. Dahlberg was an anti-Nazi, and in some instances, even an anti-racist, steering much of the institute's focus towards medical genetics. It might seem, at first glance, that the dark shadows of racial science had receded, replaced by more benign pursuits. However, this transformation was not absolute.
Even under Dahlberg, the concept of human races, and the perceived utility of measuring differences between them, remained a shared assumption. The institute, though engaging in theoretical debates about the very definition of "race," continued to conduct surveys of the Swedish population. While anthropometry, the measuring of physical traits, slowly yielded ground, it was not entirely abandoned. By the late 1950s, a new technique emerged: serology, the analysis of blood groups, which became a fresh avenue for exploring alleged racial distinctions.
Remarkably, the number of studies explicitly concerned with race did not decline in the post-war period; in fact, they saw an increase in the late 1950s compared to the preceding decades. This was not the same racial science that had horrified the world, yet it was undeniably a continuation of efforts to classify and understand human populations through a racial lens. The institute itself never truly closed its doors, merely undergoing a rebranding around 1960, transforming into the Institution of Medical Genetics at Uppsala University.
This persistent thread of inquiry, stretching from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s and beyond, forces a profound reflection on the nature of scientific progress and societal memory. The journey through this hidden history reveals that Swedish race research often involved a judgmental and ultimately racist categorisation of the population, establishing hierarchies where some groups were deemed inferior. These studies were frequently conducted in unequal encounters, exploiting vulnerable individuals under the guise of scientific pursuit.
The echoes of this past resonate into the present, compelling a crucial self-examination. How fundamentally different are the DNA analyses of today, with their fascination for "origin" and "descent," from those older traditions of racial research? There is a lingering question, a disquieting thought: are we, perhaps, unknowingly asking the same questions that vexed racial biologists of the 1930s, merely armed with new, more sophisticated technologies?
