MPC Member Publications

This database contains a listing of population studies publications written by MPC Members. Anyone can add a publication by an MPC student, faculty, or staff member to this database; new citations will be reviewed and approved by MPC administrators.

Full Citation

Title: A Century of Behavioral Genetics at the University of Minnesota

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 2022

DOI: 10.1017/thg.2023.1

Abstract: The University of Minnesota has played an important role in the resurgence and eventual mainstreaming of human behavioral genetics in psychology and psychiatry. We describe this history in the context of three major movements in behavioral genetics: (1) radical eugenics in the early 20th century, (2) resurgence of human behavioral genetics in the 1960s, largely using twin and adoption designs to obtain more precise estimates of genetic and environmental influences on individual differences in behavior; and (3) use of measured genotypes to understand behavior. University of Minnesota scientists made significant contributions especially in (2) and (3) in the domains of cognitive ability, drug abuse and mental health, and endophenotypes. These contributions are illustrated through a historical perspective of major figures and events in behavioral genetics. Human behavioral-genetic facts, theory and methodologies have become integral and mainstream in psychology, psychiatry and related behavioral disciplines. It was not always this way. Here, we outline major milestones in the history of behavioral genetics, and then describe how activities at the University of Minnesota contributed to these events. While our focus on Minnesota by necessity does not detail the many important contributions from scientists at other institutions, our goal is to present a focused history of a single institution and tradition of research, and perhaps encourage those at other institutions to do the same. Behavioral-genetic ideas are traceable to animal breeding and domestication, although the practitioners were not completely aware of the implications of the domestication process. The beginnings of the field of human behavioral genetics as a formal scientific discipline are often attributed to Francis Galton, a broadly influential figure in the history of psychology who, among many other innovations, proposed family, twin and adoption studies to parse genetic and environmental origins of behavioral attributes. Galton increasingly turned his attention to eugenics in the early 20th century, having coined the term 'well-born' in 1883. These movements were embraced by progressive writers and politicians as a means to improve the common good, at the expense of some individuals, often through forced sterilization. Eugenics laws in Western countries, including the United States, were used as models by Nazi Germany, which notoriously took them to more terrifying extremes. The postwar vilification of eugenics and, by extension, behavioral genetics, chilled genetic research on behavior for decades. Psychology and psychiatry, bereft of behavioral-genetic thought, drifted to radical environmental explanations of behavior reminiscent of the tabula rasa, including schizophreno-genic mothers causing schizophrenia in their offspring. The resurgence of behavioral-genetic research began in earnest in the 1960s when graduate training programs began emerging in US institutions, including the University of Colorado Boulder, University of Texas at Austin and the University of Minnesota. During the next four decades, twin and adoption studies routinely found that psychological traits and psychopathology were heritable, and behavioral geneticists went to lengths to test assumptions and refine their study designs to meet the many prominent critics of such findings. Overlapping this era of twin and adoption studies, Gusella et al. (1983) discovered linkage between the short arm of chromosome 4 and Huntington's chorea in 1983, ushering in a new era of excitement in gene mapping and biological explanations of complex behaviors. Linkage studies of other behavioral disorders soon followed , with limited success for complex traits. The Human Genome Project, completed in 2003, paved the way for the current technological revolution in behavioral genetics: the use of genome-wide DNA markers. Genomewide association studies of common variants have been conducted at large scales now for over a decade, and whole-genome sequencing studies of the full allelic spectrum are following. These data are being combined with new analytical technologies not just to map genes to phenotypes, but to complement and extend traditional family studies such as twin and adoption designs. The University of Minnesota and its faculty and staff have significantly contributed along the way, especially from the 1960s onward. Here, we outline some of these contributions. Early History at Minnesota: The Role of Psychology The beginning of behavioral-genetic research and scholarship at Minnesota is not simple to trace. From 1890 to 1899, psychology

Url: https://doi.org/10.1017/thg.2023.1

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Authors: Willoughby, E A; Giannelis, A; Iacono, W G; Mcgue, M; Vrieze, S I

Periodical (Full): https Twin Research and Human Genetics

Issue:

Volume: 25

Pages: 211-225

Countries:

IPUMS NHGIS NAPP IHIS ATUS Terrapop