Bodies, race, and the history of anthropology

Another overdue post from our visit to Spain this past spring...

The Museo Nacional de Antropología in Madrid has a fascinating history. The first museum in Spain to be dedicated to the study of anthropology, it was founded in 1875 as the Museum of Anatomy by Pedro González de Velasco under the patronage of King Alfonso XII. Velasco's anatomical specimens and the ethnographic artifacts collected by the Spanish government from across its then-vast empire formed the museum's original collection. Off to the left of the main entrance lies a small, nondescript room that today displays some of these items as a record of, and a tribute to, the museum's past. For me, the most interesting, and, in many ways, poignant pieces in the room was the skeleton of Augustín Luego Capilla.

Skeleton of Augustín Luego Capilla

What makes the skeleton so remarkable, and the reason why Velasco acquired it for the museum, is its size: when Capilla died at the tragically young age of 26, he stood 2.35 meters (~8 feet, 3 inches) tall. Known as the "Gigante Extremeño," or "Giant of Extramadura," Capilla earned a living as part of a circus act and, when traveling through or near Madrid in 1875, sought medical attention from Velasco. By that time he was very ill, and on December 31st he died. His mother, Josefa, apparently in gratitude for Velasco's medical care, donated her son's body to the museum for anatomical study.

Capilla's extreme stature is likely explained by pituitary gigantism, a condition caused by the excessive secretion of growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor 1. The disproportionately large mandible, abnormal bone growth around the knee joints, and enlarged hands are all symptoms of acromegaly, which is commonly associated with pituitary pathologies. Capilla is one of only a handful of acromegalic skeletons on display in western museums. Velasco also created a full body cast of Capilla's corpse before it was skeletonized (this is also on display in the museum).

Pelvic girdle of Augustín Luego Capilla showing pathological proximal
femora (note anterio-posteriorally compressed femoral heads) and acetabula.

While the skeletal material is very interesting from a paleopathological perspective, some point out, correctly I believe, how tragic Capilla's life and afterlife was and is. Being displayed today as a museum oddity, Capilla's body, one can argue, has no more dignity now than Capilla himself had as a spectacle for gawking circus-goers when he was alive. While Capilla's body was donated, this was not the case for other acromegalic skeletons, many of which were essentially stolen to be included in medical collections.

The room also houses some objects that encapsulate the rather sordid history of biological anthropology, especially its obsession with racial typology.

Die Proportionslehre der Menschlichen Gestalt,
Carl Gustav Carus, 1854. 

References:

Giménez-Roldán, S (2019). The Giant of Extramadura: acromegalic gigantism in the 19th century. Neurosciences and History 6: 38-52.

Giving a talk at the Virginia Museum of Natural History

I am travelling to Martinsville, VA, tomorrow to deliver a talk at the Virginia Museum of Natural History. I was contacted a few months ago by the museum's executive director, Dr. Joe Keiper, to participate in their 2nd Thursday Science Talks program. This year's theme is "From Cosmology to Conservation: Your World and Your Place in It." In the spirit of that theme, I will be discussing what I think Neandertals can teach us about the concept of "Race" among modern humans. Here are the talk's particulars:

A Neandertal's Perspective on the Existence of "Races" Among Modern Humans

For many years, anthropologists have grappled with the central paradox of "Race." On the one hand, the nature of human variation seriously undermines the biological reality of racial categories. On the other hand, it is evident that one's race, as a marker of status, identity, or heritage, is real and, thus, really matters. In this presentation, we will step back nearly 35,000 years, when the last Neandertals roamed Ice Age Eurasia, to explore what these extinct humans can teach us about race and, ultimately, what it means to be human in today's world.

Looking forward to it! 

The ironies (and absurdities) of slavery in the early American republic

I just finished with Alan Taylor's The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. The "internal enemy" is a term that whites often used to refer to the slaves in their midst since, as Taylor demonstrates, slave insurrections were a nearly constant fear among Virginia's slaveholders. I would highly recommend the book for those of you who are interested; here I just wanted to mention a few tidbits from the book that stuck out for me and, at the same time, highlight the sometimes highly paradoxical viewpoints that Virginia's slaveholders were forced, either intentionally or not, to maintain in order to preserve an economic system that was a large part of their cultural identity:

• The elimination of primogeniture and entail. These refer to the practices of, respectively, the inheritance by the firstborn child of the entirety of a family's estate and the restriction of inheritance to the family heirs only. When practiced, as they were in colonial America, these laws served to concentrate wealth among a small number of families and, within those families, a small number of powerful individuals. After the American Revolution, these laws were struck down in many of the former colonies, including Virginia. While American lawmakers (including most prominently Thomas Jefferson) felt that the elimination of such laws was more consistent with a republican form of government, it was actually devastating for slave families. In essence, primogeniture and entail prevented wealthy plantation owners from scattering their estates after their deaths. For slaves, this significantly reduced the likelihood that family members would be sold off. With the suppression of these laws after the revolution, wealth was more evenly distributed among whites but, at the same time, the breakup of slave families became easier and much more common.
• Blacks' lack of rights. In 1816, George Boxley hatched a plot to lead about 30 or so slaves (some of which were his own) to freedom in the North as revenge for being passed over for a militia promotion and a seat in the state legislature, both of which he blamed on the state's wealthy, slave holding elite. The plan never materialized, however, and Boxley was eventually arrested. Here's the catch, though: all the witnesses to the treasonous plot were black and therefore barred, by Virginia law, from testifying against a white man! I'll let Taylor (2013: 399) finish the story: "[u]ncertain what to do with Boxley, the authorities kept him in jail until...he escaped after breaking his irons and cutting a passage through the ceiling of his cell...[s]uspicions arose that some powerful local people wanted Boxley gone rather than risk an embarrassing trial that would acquit for lack of evidence." How's that for irony?

References:

Taylor, A (2013). The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. W.W. Norton, New York.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The summer read for this year's freshman class at UNCG is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Incidentally, we as an anthropology faculty also chose this book to represent the theme (ethics) in our department's senior capstone course for the fall. I had not read the book before (my wife had read it and recommended it highly) so I quickly finished it in order to prepare for a discussion hosted by UNCG's Office of Multicultural Affairs last Wednesday (9/4). A synopsis of the incredible story (from Amazon.com):

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells−taken without her knowledge−became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons-as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the "colored" ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta's small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia−a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo−to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family−past and present−is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family−especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother's cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance? 

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

It is an excellent book, and raises many complicated issues. The book discussion was facilitated by Dr. Frank Woods and Michael Cauthen, both a part of the faculty of UNCG's African American Studies program. (Mr. Cauthen received a Master's degree in Anthropology from Purdue.) Dr. Woods wrote a wonderful Op-ed piece on the book in the Greensboro News and Record some time ago, and he read it to start the off discussion. Mr. Cauthen then told the audience what made Henrietta's cells so unique. Most cells are programmed to die (in fact, it's called "programmed cell death," or apoptosis) after about 50 divisions, the so-called Hayflick Limit. What seems to be going on is that our chromosomes' telomeres, which function sort of like an aglet on a shoelace, get shorter and shorter each time our cells divide. We do have an enzyme, telomerase, that does its best to repair our telomeres, but eventually it gets tired out and the telomeres become too short to allow a successful cell division−hence, cell death. This made it very difficult, impossible in fact, to culture, or keep alive indefinitely, human cells for experimentation. Cancer cells, on the other hand, behave much differently: they continue to grow, and grow, and grow, until they coalesce into (sometimes malignant) tumors. At the time her cells were taken in 1951, Henrietta suffered from Type 18 of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV-18), likely acquired from her unfaithful husband. HPV-18 modified Henrietta's telomerase enzyme in such a way that it could repair her cells essentially forever (as far as we know).

After our biology lesson, Dr. Woods posed a couple of questions to the audience:

• Should the Lacks family be financially compensated in some way for the use of their mother's cells?
• Was Henrietta taken advantage of because she was black?
• Do we, or should we, own our tissues once they leave our bodies?
• In the end, did the ends justify the means?

There were opinions on all of these questions, with one audience member suggesting that Henrietta's family should receive free health care for the rest of their lives. I wonder where, or if, one would draw the line on "family": second generation, third, fourth? Some people wondered if George Gey, the scientist who first propagated the HeLa cell line, should have ensured that the Lacks family received money for the cells. However, Gey himself made no money from his work; in fact, once he had cultured the cells, he gave them away for free to any researcher that could use them. Fortunately, Henrietta is gaining some of the thanks today that she so richly deserved while alive. In reponse to the publication of the complete HeLa genome, for example, NIH will now include Lacks family members on the committees that review grants for research on the sequence. At least the family will have some say in how their relative's genome is used. Johns Hopkins, the institute that originally acquired HeLa, now sponsors a yearly Henrietta Lacks Lecture Series, the ultimate goal of which is to "honor Henrietta Lacks and the positive global impact of HeLa cells."

Dr. Woods presented the second questions in another, very interesting, way: would the same thing have happened if Henrietta had been a white woman? After all, the treatment of Henrietta's cancer and the removal of tissue without permission were standard practice at the time. Our department head, Bob Anemone, argued (correctly, I think) that one needs to avoid judging practicioners of the 1950s by today's values and standards. Another audience member made an equally valid point when she responded by asking (I'm paraphrasing), "Ok, but when do you stop using 'but it was way back when' as an excuse to wash our hands of the past?" My thought is that yes, if Henrietta had been a white woman, or any color for that matter, her cancer would have been treated in the same manner and her cells would have been taken without permission. (However, the side effects of her radiation, like vomiting, abdominal pain, and severe headaches, were probably NOT treated the same, as it was "common knowledge" that blacks as a race had a greater tolerance for pain, a misconception that had, and still has, upsetting repercussions.) What would have differed, I suspect, is how a white woman's concerns would have been treated had she, or her family, raised a legal complaint with the hospital (neither Henrietta or her family could afford a lawyer, and it probably wouldn't have mattered if they could).

What about the issue of ownership? As Skloot points out in the book, there is still no law in place that gives individuals legal ownership of their tissue once they have been removed from their bodies. Most courts, in fact, have ruled against the donor (voluntary or otherwise), the most common argument being that granting ownership of tissues to the individuals from whom they were taken creates too many poential barriers to legitimate research. I don't have a good answer for this one, although I was happy to learn that the Supreme Court has ruled that naturally occurring human genes cannot be patented. One audience member thought that the rate of research in the realm is vastly outstripping our ability to create reasonable regulatory policy.

Regarding the last question, I'll let you read the book and answer it on your own...

References:

Skloot, R (2010). The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks. Random House, New York.