What is the debt of genetics to mental health according to this article The scene in Bethlem asylum, London, in William Hogarth's 1735 A Rake's Progress.GENETICSThe debt of genetics tomental illnessDavid Dobbs lauds a history tracing heredity science tostatistics hoarded in asylums 250 years ago.ho founded genetics? The line-upusually numbers four. WilliamBateson and Wilhelm Johannsencoined the terms genetics and gene, respec-tively, at the turn of the twentieth century. In1910, Thomas Hunt Morgan began showinggenetics at work in fruit flies (see E. CallawayNature 516, 169; 2014). The runaway favour-ite is generally Gregor Mendel, who, in themid-nineteenth century, crossbred peaplants to discover the basic rules of heredity.Bosh, says historian Theodore Porter.These works are not the fount of genetics,but a rill distracting us from a much darkersource: the statistical study of heredity in asy-lums for people with mental illnesses in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-centuryBritain, wider Europe and the United States.There, "amid the moans, stench, and unrulydespair of mostly hidden places where datawere recorded, combined, and grouped intotables and graphs", the first systematic theoryof mental illness as hereditary emerged.For more than 200 years, Porter argues inGenetics in the Madhouse, we have failed torecognize this wellspring of genetics - andthus to fully understand this discipline, whichstill dominates many individual and societalresponses to mental ill-ness and diversity.The study ofheredity emerged,Porter argues, not asa science drawn tostatistics, but as aninternational endeav-our to mine data forassociations to explainmental illness. Fewrecall most of the dis-cipline's early leaders,such as French psy-chiatrist, or 'alienist',Étienne Esquirol;and physician JohnThurnam, who made the York Retreat inEngland a "model of statistical recording".Better-known figures, such as statistician KarlPearson and zoologist Charles Davenport -both ardent eugenicists - come later.Inevitably, study methods changed overtime. The early handwritten correlationtables and pedigrees of patients gave way tomore elaborate statistical tools, genetic theoryand today's massive gene-association studies.Yet the imperatives and assumptions of thatGENETICSinMADHOUSEUNKNOWINTORYHUWAS HEREDITYM.PORTERGenetics in theMadhouse: TheUnknown Historyof Human HeredityTHEODORE M. PORTERPrinceton UniversityPress (2018)scattered early network of alienists remainintact in the big-data genomics of precisionmedicine, asserts Porter. And whether appliedin 1820 or 2018, this approach too readily ele-vates biology over culture and statistics overcontext - and opens the door to eugenics.As Porter notes, alert readers might askhow a force so crucial in the birth of geneticsremained hidden. His answer distills to threearguments. First, after the Second World War,geneticists took pains to distance themselvesfrom asylum science and eugenics, and histo-rians left this largely unquestioned. Second,the system's influence is partly obscured byits cruelty and neglect; we must look pastthose to see its determination to use statis-tics to identify people as 'defective. Third, theasylum network was easy to overlook becauseit was loose and decentralized.It started with fine intentions. Manyasylum founders of the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries hoped to cure peo-ple of mental illness through a humane, psy-chosocial "moral therapy". These includedthe York Retreat's founder, William Tuke,and Esquirol d his mentor, Phillipe Pinel.These asylums and their records soonreceived transformative scrutiny. In 1788,King George III of Britain, who since his cor-onation had sometimes displayed symptomssuggesting psychosis, had an extreme epi-sode. Understanding mental illness becamea national-security issue. The alienists' assess-ment, bolstered by physician William Black's"original, useful, and authentick" statistics.from London's Bethlem asylum, gave thegovernment leverage to replace the king witha regent-his son, later King George IV.This much-publicized process spurred adecades-long growth in asylums run by the"numerical method", and the use of nationalcensuses to measure what seemed an epi-demic of 'insanity. At the time, this baggyterm encompassed a range of behavioursdeemed extreme. Similar developments else-where helped spread this methodology acrossmost of the developed Western world.From London and Paris to Schussenried,Germany, and Worcester, Massachusetts, asy-lums grew and new ones sprouted. Knittingthem together was an active system of corre-spondence, travel, conferences and publica-tions such as the American Journal of Insanityand the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie.At first, asylums claimed absurdly high'cure' rates. Reports of 50% were routine.The Connecticut Retreat claimed 91.6% fouryears in a row. By the mid-nineteenth century,however, asylum directors realized that theycould simply say, as some big-data psychiatricgeneticists do now, that although a cure seemsdistant, statistical patterns discovered in ever-larger study populations will one day reveala cause and a cure will follow. Fundersbought it. Asylum science grew apace.Eventually, having eliminated religiousfervour, heartbreak, financial strain andVELLCOME COLL masturbation as causes for mental ill-ness, alienists fixed on the only pattern left:patients' pedigrees. Heredity was "the onegreat cause... the cause of causes", as Frenchsurgeon Ulysse Trélat proclaimed in 1856.Thus asylum scientists unwittingly laid apath to disaster. For if mental illness boileddown to heredity, the final cure if youinsisted on imposing one became bothobvious and unspeakable.Porter's chapters, with titles smacking ofgothic Victorian novels, trace the long walk tocorruption. Narratives of mad despair accu-mulate as information' gives way to 'Germandoctors organize data to turn the tables ondegeneration, a foretaste of horror. The finalchapter, 'Psychiatric geneticists create colos-sal databases, some with horrifying purposes,1920-1939, sees eugenics deployed en masse.After the 1927 Supreme Court decision Buckv. Bell, US programmes forced sterilizationon tens of thousands of people deemed men-tally deficient. The Nazis built on that exam-ple in the 1930s by sterilizing some 400,000Germans labelled hereditarily 'defective. In1940, they launched their wider genocidalprogramme by gathering more than 10,000people from asylums all over southern Ger-many and gassing them at Grafeneck Castle.The story of the era, Porter insists, is notone "of isolated failings by a few bad scien-tists". Every genetic insight along the way wassucked into the stream. Many geneticists andalienists had invested too heavily to stop. Oth-ers had the task brought to them. It was not bychance that the Holocaust found its first vic-tims in asylums, which also housed the ros-ters, records and rationale that doomed them.This matters for many reasons, accord-ing to Porter, the most immediate being theelemental links between this history andcontemporary study of heredity. As Porterexposes strand after strand of connection, hedraws sobering parallels between the motives,methods, obsessions and promises of bygoneasylum directors, and those of the enormoushuman-genomics institutes that now enjoyunprecedented funding and power.To Porter, these connections are roots, andtoday's genomics industry the tree. "Sold witha promise to find the genes for talents, dis-eases, and every kind of personal character-istic", he writes, genetics has returned to "thetradition of amassing, ordering, and depict-ing data of biological inheritance" that startedmore than two centuries ago, in squalor.Some will reject this idea ferociously. ButI suspect this bold, dauntingly well-docu-mented book will prove difficult to dismiss.David Dobbs, author of My Mother'sLover, writes on science, culture, music and

Question

What is the debt of genetics to mental health according to this article The scene in Bethlem asylum, London, in William Hogarth's 1735 A Rake's Progress.GENETICSThe debt of genetics tomental illnessDavid Dobbs lauds a history tracing heredity science tostatistics hoarded in asylums 250 years ago.ho founded genetics? The line-upusually numbers four. WilliamBateson and Wilhelm Johannsencoined the terms genetics and gene, respec-tively, at the turn of the twentieth century. In1910, Thomas Hunt Morgan began showinggenetics at work in fruit flies (see E. CallawayNature 516, 169; 2014). The runaway favour-ite is generally Gregor Mendel, who, in themid-nineteenth century, crossbred peaplants to discover the basic rules of heredity.Bosh, says historian Theodore Porter.These works are not the fount of genetics,but a rill distracting us from a much darkersource: the statistical study of heredity in asy-lums for people with mental illnesses in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-centuryBritain, wider Europe and the United States.There, &#34;amid the moans, stench, and unrulydespair of mostly hidden places where datawere recorded, combined, and grouped intotables and graphs&#34;, the first systematic theoryof mental illness as hereditary emerged.For more than 200 years, Porter argues inGenetics in the Madhouse, we have failed torecognize this wellspring of genetics - andthus to fully understand this discipline, whichstill dominates many individual and societalresponses to mental ill-ness and diversity.The study ofheredity emerged,Porter argues, not asa science drawn tostatistics, but as aninternational endeav-our to mine data forassociations to explainmental illness. Fewrecall most of the dis-cipline's early leaders,such as French psy-chiatrist, or 'alienist',Étienne Esquirol;and physician JohnThurnam, who made the York Retreat inEngland a &#34;model of statistical recording&#34;.Better-known figures, such as statistician KarlPearson and zoologist Charles Davenport -both ardent eugenicists - come later.Inevitably, study methods changed overtime. The early handwritten correlationtables and pedigrees of patients gave way tomore elaborate statistical tools, genetic theoryand today's massive gene-association studies.Yet the imperatives and assumptions of thatGENETICSinMADHOUSEUNKNOWINTORYHUWAS HEREDITYM.PORTERGenetics in theMadhouse: TheUnknown Historyof Human HeredityTHEODORE M. PORTERPrinceton UniversityPress (2018)scattered early network of alienists remainintact in the big-data genomics of precisionmedicine, asserts Porter. And whether appliedin 1820 or 2018, this approach too readily ele-vates biology over culture and statistics overcontext - and opens the door to eugenics.As Porter notes, alert readers might askhow a force so crucial in the birth of geneticsremained hidden. His answer distills to threearguments. First, after the Second World War,geneticists took pains to distance themselvesfrom asylum science and eugenics, and histo-rians left this largely unquestioned. Second,the system's influence is partly obscured byits cruelty and neglect; we must look pastthose to see its determination to use statis-tics to identify people as 'defective. Third, theasylum network was easy to overlook becauseit was loose and decentralized.It started with fine intentions. Manyasylum founders of the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries hoped to cure peo-ple of mental illness through a humane, psy-chosocial &#34;moral therapy&#34;. These includedthe York Retreat's founder, William Tuke,and Esquirol d his mentor, Phillipe Pinel.These asylums and their records soonreceived transformative scrutiny. In 1788,King George III of Britain, who since his cor-onation had sometimes displayed symptomssuggesting psychosis, had an extreme epi-sode. Understanding mental illness becamea national-security issue. The alienists' assess-ment, bolstered by physician William Black's&#34;original, useful, and authentick&#34; statistics.from London's Bethlem asylum, gave thegovernment leverage to replace the king witha regent-his son, later King George IV.This much-publicized process spurred adecades-long growth in asylums run by the&#34;numerical method&#34;, and the use of nationalcensuses to measure what seemed an epi-demic of 'insanity. At the time, this baggyterm encompassed a range of behavioursdeemed extreme. Similar developments else-where helped spread this methodology acrossmost of the developed Western world.From London and Paris to Schussenried,Germany, and Worcester, Massachusetts, asy-lums grew and new ones sprouted. Knittingthem together was an active system of corre-spondence, travel, conferences and publica-tions such as the American Journal of Insanityand the Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie.At first, asylums claimed absurdly high'cure' rates. Reports of 50% were routine.The Connecticut Retreat claimed 91.6% fouryears in a row. By the mid-nineteenth century,however, asylum directors realized that theycould simply say, as some big-data psychiatricgeneticists do now, that although a cure seemsdistant, statistical patterns discovered in ever-larger study populations will one day reveala cause and a cure will follow. Fundersbought it. Asylum science grew apace.Eventually, having eliminated religiousfervour, heartbreak, financial strain andVELLCOME COLL masturbation as causes for mental ill-ness, alienists fixed on the only pattern left:patients' pedigrees. Heredity was &#34;the onegreat cause... the cause of causes&#34;, as Frenchsurgeon Ulysse Trélat proclaimed in 1856.Thus asylum scientists unwittingly laid apath to disaster. For if mental illness boileddown to heredity, the final cure if youinsisted on imposing one became bothobvious and unspeakable.Porter's chapters, with titles smacking ofgothic Victorian novels, trace the long walk tocorruption. Narratives of mad despair accu-mulate as information' gives way to 'Germandoctors organize data to turn the tables ondegeneration, a foretaste of horror. The finalchapter, 'Psychiatric geneticists create colos-sal databases, some with horrifying purposes,1920-1939, sees eugenics deployed en masse.After the 1927 Supreme Court decision Buckv. Bell, US programmes forced sterilizationon tens of thousands of people deemed men-tally deficient. The Nazis built on that exam-ple in the 1930s by sterilizing some 400,000Germans labelled hereditarily 'defective. In1940, they launched their wider genocidalprogramme by gathering more than 10,000people from asylums all over southern Ger-many and gassing them at Grafeneck Castle.The story of the era, Porter insists, is notone &#34;of isolated failings by a few bad scien-tists&#34;. Every genetic insight along the way wassucked into the stream. Many geneticists andalienists had invested too heavily to stop. Oth-ers had the task brought to them. It was not bychance that the Holocaust found its first vic-tims in asylums, which also housed the ros-ters, records and rationale that doomed them.This matters for many reasons, accord-ing to Porter, the most immediate being theelemental links between this history andcontemporary study of heredity. As Porterexposes strand after strand of connection, hedraws sobering parallels between the motives,methods, obsessions and promises of bygoneasylum directors, and those of the enormoushuman-genomics institutes that now enjoyunprecedented funding and power.To Porter, these connections are roots, andtoday's genomics industry the tree. &#34;Sold witha promise to find the genes for talents, dis-eases, and every kind of personal character-istic&#34;, he writes, genetics has returned to &#34;thetradition of amassing, ordering, and depict-ing data of biological inheritance&#34; that startedmore than two centuries ago, in squalor.Some will reject this idea ferociously. ButI suspect this bold, dauntingly well-docu-mented book will prove difficult to dismiss.David Dobbs, author of My Mother'sLover, writes on science, culture, music and

Accepted Answer

The article challenges conventional narratives surrounding the origins of genetics by asserting that…