Robert Kirk: blood, genetics, race and rights in the twentieth century

Abstract

Warning: This article discusses blood collecting in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It also contains the image of an unnamed Aboriginal man who may be deceased.

It is not without justification that the collecting of blood for genetic analysis is frequently associated with race science, but it is not solely or inevitably so. This history of Robert Kirk, a British–Australian population geneticist, confronts blood collecting in the twentieth century. Other histories have analysed the conflation of race with the science of inheritance in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the re-emergence of race in genomics at century’s end. Kirk’s practice of blood analysis and his support for Indigenous rights intercalates those periods, bridging interwar anti-racist theoretical geneticists, and late twentieth century genomic scientists. Through Kirk’s research activities we learn about the twinning of blood science and progressive politics, and the challenges and intersections that posed. Through Kirk’s legacy collection of blood samples now returned to Indigenous control, we see the potential transmutation of a problematic past into a promising future.