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

In 1997, Professor Simon Easteal, the Head of the Human Genetics Group at the Australian National University (ANU) faced a dilemma. What was he to do with the large blood collection that his predecessor, Robert Kirk, had amassed over two decades? Of the roughly 100,000 residual samples in that collection, 7000 required special consideration: they were from Indigenous Australians. Within Australia and worldwide, Indigenous peoples were raising concerns about the use of similar biobanks for the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP). They were concerned about misuse of their DNA, biopiracy of their gene sequences, and the potential scientific contestation of their culturally held concepts of identity and origins. Indigenous peoples were also concerned about the resurrection of scientific racism.¹ HGDP proponent Luca Cavalli-Sforza thought them unnecessarily alarmed about the latter, writing, ‘half a century of research into human variation has supported the opposite view—that there is no scientific basis for racism’.² Difference, he was arguing, is not equivalent to race. Although the cultural concept of ‘race’ has been detached from the scientific proposition of ‘difference’, the boundary between them has often been wafer-thin.³ It is a boundary that the collector of the ANU samples, Robert Kirk, navigated throughout his genetics career, between 1953 and 1987.

Blood, race, and the science of human difference are intertwined in many histories, particularly of population genetics in the first half of the twentieth century, and population genomics in the late twentieth century.⁴ Several historians have examined the pre-1950s tussle between race-theory anthropologists and anti-racism scientists in Britain, Europe and the United States.⁵ In the analysis of other geographies, most recently the Middle-East and India, historians have explored the specifics of biological ‘race’, and the pressing of genetics into the service of origins and national identity.⁶ Australia too has histories of Indigenous blood collecting for anthropology and population genetics. Philip Jones, David Thomas and Warwick Anderson have reflected on the interwar and mid-twentieth century blood science of the Board of Anthropological Research and their associates.⁷ In histories of the late twentieth-century, Emma Kowal and Joanna Radin have analysed the mutable biopolitics and cryopolitics of salvage genetics, particularly that of Kirk’s ANU blood collection.⁸

Few histories analyse the intersection of population genetics with the contestation of anthropological race in Australia, or elsewhere, between the 1950s and 1980s.⁹ In the mid-1950s a new method of blood biochemistry was introduced, increasing the scale of population genetics analysis until it was superseded by DNA sequencing in the 1980s. The period 1950s–1980s also coincided with social justice transformations that had a bearing on that science. Robert Kirk (1921–2010, Fig. 1) happened to cross both this science and this political context. And so, a study of his life spans the mid-twentieth century ‘retreat of scientific racism’, and a late twentieth century genomics re-complicated by the spectre of race. This article begins by establishing Kirk’s ties to renowned interwar anti-race scientist, Lancelot Hogben, then follows Kirk’s journey through the science of difference and relatedness that was population genetics. It reveals an unusual pairing of blood science and progressive politics, the challenges of undoing anthropological race in the second half of the twentieth century, and the resolution of a problematic blood collecting legacy. It is a history of population genetics in its social context, but it is also an analysis of a different type of inheritance: Kirk, the intellectual descendant of an anti-racist blood research pioneer, and the disciplinary antecedent to pro-Indigenous rights genomic scientists.

Fig. 1.

ANU staff photograph of Robert Kirk, Head of Human Genetics Groups, John Curtin School of Medical Research. (©Australian National University Archives Centre, ANUA-226-687).

The path to social biology and genetics

When Robert Louis Kirk was born in 1921 into a lower middle-class family in the steel city of Bilston, England, it would have seemed unlikely that he would become an internationally renowned geneticist, let alone the curator of the most significant serum archive of Indigenous Australians in the twentieth century. From an early age, long before he developed an interest in genetics, Kirk was attuned to social issues. In high school he mixed with ‘radical friends’ including members of the British Communist Party. As a Birmingham University chemistry undergraduate he was exempt from World War II military service, but he registered as a conscientious objector anyway.¹⁰ Kirk had no training in biology but when his university enrolment was withdrawn in 1941 (possibly as a consequence of his objection to service), he approached the incoming professor of zoology, Lancelot Hogben for patronage.¹¹ That decision to approach the well-known leftist biologist had a profound impact on Kirk’s life.

Lancelot Thomas Hogben (1895–1975) was a democratic socialist and a public proponent of fairness and social equality.¹² In 1916, Hogben too had become a conscientious objector, even though as a Quaker he was entitled to a service exemption. Refusing the non-combat war service that was a requirement of Cambridge University medical students, he was incarcerated briefly, his medical career derailed permanently. When he eventually found a science-related position, it was in the new field of cytology.¹³ If Kirk was looking for a sympathetic mentor, Hogben was a perfect choice.

Hogben arrived at Birmingham University with excellent academic credentials. According to his friend, zoologist George Wells, he was ‘a brilliant biologist, a stimulating and indefatigable teacher, and a famous writer’.¹⁴ In cytology he had upended the prevailing hypothesis of meiotic chromosome pairing, a precursor to determining the linear arrangement of genes.¹⁵ He had written textbooks on genetics, mathematics, comparative physiology and linguistics, and had successfully conducted research in metabolic processes and endocrinology, frequently in close collaboration with his gifted wife, Enid Charles.¹⁶ Hogben was deeply interested in evolution and genetics, and was one of five British investigators who dominated early blood group research in pursuit of that understanding.¹⁷ Although blood types and race were conflated in some circles, it was not so for Hogben, who was highly critical of racial anthropology and argued against the idea of race itself.¹⁸ He was close friends with Neo-Darwinists J. B. S. Haldane (a communist and one of the pioneers of population genetics) and Julian Huxley (who was instrumental in merging Mendelian genetics and Darwinian selection in the ‘modern synthesis’ of evolution).¹⁹ Although Hogben, Haldane and Huxley held differing views on several matters, by the 1930s they were all outspoken against the existence of biological race.²⁰ Just days before World War II they were signatories to the ‘Geneticists’ Manifesto’, that historian Alison Bashford suggests was ‘one of the world’s most important statements about genetics and race’.²¹

This is the world of ideas that Kirk entered when he became Hogben’s research assistant in comparative physiology.²² Later, Kirk would himself conduct population genetics studies using blood and contest the idea of ‘race’, but between 1942 and 1946 he investigated temperature regulation, environmental adaptation and survival in molluscs, earthworms, amphibians and reptiles. It earned him a Masters degree.²³ Kirk also developed and delivered a ‘social biology’ curriculum with Hogben (who had been inaugural Chair of Social Biology at the London School of Economics and Political science).²⁴ Hogben described social biology as the application of scientific knowledge (mathematics and biology, but particularly evolution) for the advancement of human wellbeing and social justice.²⁵ He introduced ‘genetical concepts … into sociological discussion’ of equal opportunity and social progress.²⁶ Social biology was at the core of Hogben, Haldane and Huxley’s scientific humanism, and like them, or perhaps because of them, Kirk considered himself a humanist too.²⁷

In the same period, Hogben pursued a wide range of other projects, including one on genetic polymorphisms (variants) of the recently discovered Rhesus (Rh) blood type. The Rh system was found to have serious incompatibility implications for blood transfusion (of similar conseqeuence to the ABO system). When Rh incompatibility between a mother and her foetus was found to also cause haemolytic disease or death in the foetus, it reinvigorated research in blood type serology.²⁸ To population geneticists, the idea that a mother’s blood could be lethal to her foetus suggested a surprising mechanism of evolutionary selection. Hogben theorised the genetic implications of Rh incompatibility and made recommendations for further research.²⁹ A few years later he would ask evolutionary selection questions of the ABO system too,³⁰ as would Kirk in 1953, after a zoological detour.

After the war Kirk left Hogben’s laboratory, moving twice before the decade’s end, both times availing himself of his mentor’s connections. In 1946, newly married to zoology honours graduate, Mildred Coates (1925–2002), Kirk became Assistant Professor of Physiology at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. The Kirks did not stay there long. Troubled by the deeply entrenched racism and early signs of McCarthyism in the US, they left for Australia in 1949.³¹ Similar racial discriminatory policies there did not deter Kirk from accepting a lectureship in the newly established zoology department at the University of Western Australia (UWA).³²

Indigenous people faced a phalanx of constraints and inequities in mid-twentieth century Australia. Under the Natives (Citizenship Rights) Act, 1944, citizenship for Aboriginal people was conditional on proof of being ‘civilised’.³³ They could not vote in WA elections and were subjected to uncompensated forced removal from their ancestral lands. Under the assimilation policy, authorities had the power to permanently remove fair-skinned Indigenous children from their families and to institutionalise, foster or adopt them forcibly into white families.³⁴ The archives are silent about what the Kirks made of this on arrival, although as we shall see, all these matters became central to the work of each in the 1970s and 1980s.

At UWA, Kirk slotted into mammalian endocrinology research but as the field of genetics began to stir, he was drawn to it.³⁵ A gene was still a conceptual entity in 1952 when DNA was confirmed as the genetic material. In 1953, the exact number of human chromosomes was still unknown, but the double helical structure of its constituent DNA was described. That year, population genetics pioneer Ronald A. Fisher also declared that blood groups had ‘completely revolutionized’ genetics.³⁶ In 1953 Kirk published three articles on selective inheritance and evolutionary adaptation. One investigated the inherited ability of flies and mosquitoes to survive poisonous DDT, while another determined the differential ability ‘among the white population of Australia’ to smell toxic cyanide.³⁷ The third, co-authored with his wife Mildred and statistician N. S. Stenhouse, compared the fertility rates of women with O and A blood types in a Perth maternity hospital.³⁸ They probed for selective disadvantage in the manner of the Rh maternal-foetal blood incompatibility described earlier. Population genetics of the early 1950s was largely a mathematical theory-driven endeavour, subject to experimental confirmation. Since genes could not be interrogated directly, physical attributes were their proxy. For example, in the Drosophila fly labs, the inheritance, mutation and selection of single-gene traits, such as eye colour and wing structures could easily be tracked through controlled breeding.³⁹ In humans, blood types were a comparable objective measure, but absent laboratory breeding controls, their analysis required data on very large numbers of individuals in different populations. Appropriate techniques for representative sampling and mathematical analysis were key to the understanding of human inheritance.⁴⁰

The Kirks did not perform the blood type serology themselves; initially they collated data from hospital patient records. To establish the boundaries of a ‘socially-homogeneous’ population, they only used the records of public (that is, not private) patients. Their study built on published research, including Hogben’s meta-analysis, to statistically assess if O-type mothers had a disproportionate loss of their A-type foetus. Such a loss would be indicative of selective disadvantage (an evolutionary weeding out of the A allele).⁴¹ It raised many questions. How could the ratio of A to O alleles therefore remain stable (as it was known to do)? Why was an apparently unfavourable A allele still more common in ‘Europeans’ than the less deleterious B allele (itself less common than the sometimes-lethal Rhesus-negative allele)?

Many geneticists from all over the world conducted similar research, and each study was a patient, cumulative contribution of empirical data. Therefore, it was not Kirk’s A/O incompatibility paper that caught the attention of the linchpin of blood typing and blood research, Arthur Mourant, but rather his one-page communique in Nature, on the differential ability to smell cyanide (an apparently sex-linked recessive trait). Mourant was director of the world-renowned Blood Group Reference Laboratory, London, and of the Nuffield Blood Group Centre (the first institution dedicated to the collection and dissemination of data on worldwide human blood diversity).⁴² But he was interested in all things genetic, so he wrote to Kirk, congratulating him on the cyanide paper. He thought that trait’s value was in its chromosome mapping potential, because only two other X-linked genes had thus far been identified (colour blindness and haemophilia).⁴³ He also suggested that Kirk’s cyanide studies could be extended to different ‘racial groups’ including ‘Aborigines’, but Kirk did not take up that suggestion. He was already involved in other blood studies.⁴⁴

Local, regional, international

Kirk was well schooled in population genetics, but could reach into his bookshelf at any time for a refresher from his mentor, Hogben.⁴⁵ From Mourant he received encouragement, helpful references and contacts in the blood research world. It marked a turning point in Kirk’s career; almost all his subsequent publications, well over 180 of them, were on human blood inheritance or medical genetics.⁴⁶ Initially, Kirk continued his research on ABO blood incompatibilities, extending his collaborations beyond Perth to a Melbourne Red Cross blood transfusion service and a large maternity hospital. He collated data from 26,284 women, in search of fertility differences indicative of genetic selection.⁴⁷ His comparative studies revealed more about the social than the genetic, however. Observing a city-related age difference in women’s reproductive patterns, he attributed it to the ‘size and social structure’ of those locations: the Perth mothers were younger because in Melbourne there was a larger group of recent migrants who, for war-related reasons, had delayed pregnancy.⁴⁸

Although several blood type systems, such as ABO and Rh, had been identified between 1900 and 1950, their method of detection (blood serology) had changed little. Soon after Kirk began genetic research however, a new technique, starch gel electrophoresis, became available. In his opinion it ‘opened up an entirely new field’ of genetics.⁴⁹ Canadian-based biochemist Oliver Smithies had developed that technique to better separate types of insulin macromolecules based on their size and charge, but out of curiosity ran a trial with blood serum. Because of the technique’s greater resolving power, that one trial more than doubled the number of known serum proteins (from five to eleven). It also revealed an unexpectedly high degree of genetic variation, which resolved a long-standing debate about how much genetic variation existed in nature, and what that meant in evolutionary terms.⁵⁰ Some had argued that heterozygosity (possession of a different variant of a gene on each of a chromosomal pair) was detrimental, and that an accumulation of gene heterozygosity was lethal to humans.⁵¹ Hogben, Haldane and Huxley had argued the contrary, that evolution did not eradicate variation, rather, genetic diversity was important for human development as well as for social evolution.⁵² The newly apparent extent of variation supported their arguments, and Kirk and others eagerly adopted starch gel electrophoresis to investigate serum protein polymorphisms.

The debate about difference versus race, continued through the 1950s, even as greater and greater genetic diversity became apparent in individuals and groups, putting further distance between anti-race scientists and the early twentieth century anthropologists who posited race.⁵³ Although historian Elazar Barkan argues that there was a repudiation of scientific racism following WWII, the spectre of race continued to inhabit anthropological and genetic discourse.⁵⁴ In the early 1950s, race was hotly debated at the annual genetics conference at Cold Spring Harbor, and at UNESCO.⁵⁵ Anthropologist Ashley Montagu (rapporteur for the UNESCO statement on the nature of race) explained that popular and scientific conceptions of race differed, that race was not based on ‘absolute phenotypical differences’ but indicated ‘relative differences in the frequency distribution of traits or genes … [akin to] variation in likeness rather than difference’.⁵⁶ The relative difference or sameness depended on which genes were selected for study, and which individuals were selected to represent the group.⁵⁷ Geneticist William Boyd insisted, ‘It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, gene loci we choose to consider as a significant “constellation”’.⁵⁸ The new genetic view of ‘race’ was not of a static and hierarchical typology of purity, it was of a dynamic diversity related to migration, mutation and mating patterns. It was mutable, related to the particular people and proteins analysed in each experiment.

If the term ‘race’ was muddied by popular usage and therefore to be avoided in science, what could be its substitute?⁵⁹ Kirk and his colleagues attempted other organising principles in a more neutral taxonomic language. What constitutes a cultural group, an ethnic group, a geographically defined group? Should investigators search for an isolated group, and if so, how? Could a set of people be reasonably circumscribed for scientific enquiry, and what was a representative sample? It was a challenge, and we see in Kirk’s corpus a vacillation over terms (ethnic groups and descent) and approaches (by geographical location, and by cultural, historical or language affiliation) and in this lumping and splitting, how to explore human diversity.

Kirk’s research scaled up. Frequently he collaborated with Gerard Vos, a serologist at a Perth maternity hospital, and his wife, Dell Vos, who assisted with administration, statistics, laboratory and field work.⁶⁰ At first, in their search for clues to evolutionary selection through maternal-foetal blood-type incompatibilities, they investigated thousands of urban ante-natal clinic attendees and maternity hospital admissions.⁶¹ How were they to define sub-population for analysis? Dancing around the edges of anthropology, Kirk borrowed an approach from Mourant, distinguishing populations based on personal names in medical records.⁶² Using women’s names, English and non-English, Kirk derived two groups for analysis. It was a lumping together of ‘recent arrivals’ from the Netherlands, Eastern, Central and Southern Europe as a comparison against the ‘Australian population’.⁶³ That study had flaws (not least because names do not necessarily denote origin and tended to follow a paternal lineage) and lacked historical awareness (Australia’s previous settlers were not homogenously British), but also because arrivals from the previous two hundred years made them all ‘recent migrants’ in evolutionary terms. It demonstrates Kirk’s difficulty in defining an experimental population beyond the socio-historical category of ‘race’.

In the late 1950s, Kirk extended his genetic polymorphism research to Indigenous Australians (Fig. 2). Interwar sero-anthropologists had already established a rarity of B-type blood in Aboriginal Australians, suggesting a closer alignment to ‘European’ populations for that trait than to those of proximate Asia.⁶⁴ A few years prior, anthropologist Joseph Birdsell had incorrectly hypothesised three distinct waves of migrations, formulating a tri-hybrid racial theory for Australia’s original inhabitants.⁶⁵ Because the rare B-type blood ran in a decreasing gradient southward from northern Queensland, others had proposed that the B allele was of ‘recent Malay or Papuan origin’. Interpreting that evidence was difficult though, because of the small data set.⁶⁶

Fig. 2.

Kirk on a scientific expedition, pictured with an unnamed man at Pineapple Bore, Halls Creek, Northern Territory. (01P-02-27, NCIG Archive, ANU, Canberra) © Kirk family.

It was in that context that Kirk began his blood studies of Indigenous Australians, and simultaneously, of the then recently independent Malaya. To capitalise on Smithies’ electrophoretic innovation, he established the technique first for haptoglobins (haemoglobin binding proteins) in 394 blood samples from Perth.⁶⁷ Almost the entire ‘White Australian’ population displayed homozygosity. Since haemoglobin heterozygosity had recently been found to confer an advantage against malaria in sickle cell disease, homozygosity was thought to be a genetic disadvantage.⁶⁸ Kirk wondered if serum protein heterozygosity could similarly be linked to disease protection, and he expanded his blood investigation, including haptoglobin, transferrin and gamma globin in local Indigenous populations, in the neighbouring Pacific and further afield.⁶⁹

In Australia, Kirk’s investigations spanned the coastal Cape York Peninsula, the Queensland coastal margin, the tropical Top End and the vast Western Desert cultural bloc. That bloc ranges across the continent, incorporating four desert zones from just below Broome and the Kimberleys, east, to the centre, where it slips briefly into Queensland before curving down to South Australia and back across the Nullarbor.⁷⁰ By 1960, many Indigenous inhabitants of those areas had been disturbed or dislodged by agriculturalists, miners, explorers, missionaries and government officials.⁷¹ They were concentrated into localities, as archaeologist-historian Mike Smith observed, not by dispossession but by an ‘incremental emptying’.⁷² The Kukatja, Pintupi, Luritja, Jankunzazara, Naglia, Iliaura, Aranda and many, many others had encountered early anthropologists, witnessed their observations and measurements, their recordings and tracings, their tabulations of waterholes and their transcriptions of names, places and family relationships.⁷³ Next came the population geneticists, like Kirk, to catalogue genetic markers in their blood.

Kirk was present at some of the collecting trips but depended on the medically trained to draw blood from an amalgam of linguistic groups concentrated into localities under government programs, religious institutions or in private enterprise.⁷⁴ His productivity did not go unnoticed in government circles. When the Menzies government established the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) in 1961, Kirk was one of six invitees to the Human Biology Panel.⁷⁵ The work of the AIAS was research, not policy development. The same year that he became a founding member of AIAS, Kirk also became president of the WA Association for Immigration Reform. It challenged the White Australia policy, arguing that its ‘taint of racial superiority’ weakened Australia’s world standing.⁷⁶ He recognised the classificatory harms of cultural race-based thinking and racism, and that race as a scientific device was distinct from it.

Hogben had assiduously argued against racism, and Julian Huxley put quote marks around the term ‘race’.⁷⁷ Kirk rarely used ‘race’ in his publications, but he did try to define it within a narrow scientific context, stripping it of the purity, fixity and hierarchy introduced by early anthropologists. In an undated draft proposal for his never-published book, The Races of Man, Kirk rejected concepts of superiority and primitivity, thus distinguishing scientific ‘race’ from racism.⁷⁸ In this, his views were closely aligned to the arguments of mid-century anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Ashley Montagu, although Montagu went further, proposing that the use of the term ‘race’ could itself be regarded as racist.⁷⁹ Kirk, the student of Hogben (who had rejected biological race), conducted blood studies on Indigenous populations in the tradition of race science, occasionally even in reference to race, but on a very different premise.

For Kirk in this context, ‘race’ was an abstraction, a conceptual mechanism to mark the patterns of diversity in particular populations, for a given set of genes, at a moment in time. It could not be further from the original anthropological race defined by skin colour and hair type, or the amorphous social myth of race. For Kirk (and most other population geneticists) traits that were invisible, objective and scientifically supported, like blood types and serum proteins, were therefore most suitable for studies of human diversity.⁸⁰ Kirk used them not to confirm racial origins, but to answer the fundamental genetic questions: how did human population differences arise in terms of mutation, drift and selection? How did rapid changes to social and physical environments change inherited characteristics? Was it genetically favourable or unfavourable for previously separate populations to start reproducing, and from whose perspective?⁸¹

Kirk preferred to study remote populations over those in urban settings because, he wrote, ‘the voluntary control of contraception, modern medical techniques and high mobility between different geographic areas masks the effect of natural selection’.⁸² Within a few years he amassed several thousand vials of Indigenous sera.⁸³ That was just the start. Simultaneous with his blood research in Australia, Kirk embarked on a project supported by the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO).⁸⁴ A product of the Cold War, SEATO reflected precarious regional and supra-regional politics and international military alliances. Established to improve stability and economies, it exercised soft power through sponsorship of cultural, religious, educational and scientific affairs.⁸⁵ With SEATO funds secured, Kirk turned to Mourant for contacts and advice on blood collecting in south and southeast Asia (Fig. 3).⁸⁶ New technologies, including cold chain logistics and IBM computing, broadened the possibilities for bio-sample transportation, data tabulation and evaluation.⁸⁷ On Mourant’s advice, Kirk’s group assessed as many traits as possible: polymorphic blood groups (ABO, MNS, Rh, P, Kell, Duffy and Lewis), serum proteins (haptoglobins, transferrin, ⍺₂-globulin group-specific components, gamma globulins and haemoglobins) and enzymes (cholinesterase and 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase).⁸⁸

Fig. 3.

Kirk’s representation of Gc allele distribution in populations from Oceania, south and southeast Asia. © S. Karga AG, Kirk and others (1963).

First, Kirk and his collaborators assayed sera from three major Malayan ethnic groups: Malays, Chinese and Indians.⁸⁹ The use of ethnic groups as an organising principle of research had its own challenges. Some researchers viewed them as ‘isolates’, that is, groups of individuals geographically or socially constrained from reproducing with neighbouring peoples.⁹⁰ But in the 1960s, as more and more polymorphic proteins were identified, it became increasingly difficult to make sense of the allelic distributions in the hyphenated identities reflected in ethnicities. For example, Indian-Malays were, in the next round of analysis, further hived off into Tamils and Sikhs. In India itself, several tribal populations from small villages provided narrower, smaller geographic populations of comparison. In Thailand, ‘care was taken to exclude persons with known recent Chinese ancestry’, but this did not recognise the obvious—that genes can indiscriminately carry forward a distant inheritance, and Thai-Sino relations had been continuous since the fifteenth century. Sometimes, an allele in a tribal group was found to be more similar to a geographically remote population than it was to a neighbour.⁹¹ What did that mean for migration, mutation, relatedness and selection? This was a different iteration of a familiar interwar problem, when blood grouping of Aboriginal Australians seemed to confirm ‘earlier, scattered speculation that Aborigines were in fact “archaic” or “dark” Caucasians’, an assertion that historian Warwick Anderson proposed, shifted the ‘boundaries of “whiteness”’.⁹² Now that a constellation of proteins could be evaluated together, the pattern of affinity or divergence for each were found to be discordant. Just like Mendel’s pea experiments, each polymorphism sorted independently. There were no essential races, ethnicities, or any other groupings.

Kirk was part of an international network of scientists devoted to the systematic building of a vast body of knowledge, protein by protein, population by population, calculation by calculation. Applying historian John V. Pickstone’s analytic framework, it was a coexistence of two ways of knowing: natural history and mathematical analysis, a sorting of types as a forerunner to knowing its meaning.⁹³ Occasionally there were more immediate medical applications. For example, Kirk, with Gerard and Dell Vos, published a report in The Lancet about an Aboriginal woman with no Rh antigen at all. It was so rare that she became the only paid donor in Australia, her blood valued for its detection of other rare cases (including babies at risk of foetal-maternal blood incompatibilities).⁹⁴

A growing research profile provided Kirk with many connections and opportunities at the highest scientific levels, including a visiting fellowship to Rockefeller University, New York. Kirk also shared blood samples with several international investigators, including Carlton Gajdusek and Baruch Blumberg.⁹⁵ Both Gajdusek and Blumberg would be awarded Nobel prizes in 1976 in relation to infectious diseases, (kuru for Gajdusek, hepatitis B for Blumberg). Blumberg’s startling breakthrough was made through Indigenous Australian blood serum that Kirk provided.⁹⁶ Gajdusek would later describe Kirk as ‘the foremost human geneticist in the Southern Hemisphere, and a figure of world reputation in the population genetics of man’.⁹⁷

From at least 1962, Kirk was also involved in WHO population genetics research groups, sometimes as rapporteur, and for two years from January 1965, as its first Chief of Human Genetics.⁹⁸ In the mid-1960s, Kirk became a member of the planning committee of the International Biological Program (IBP) with the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). Like the interwar scientific humanists, the ICSU called for the marriage of science with social responsibility. Their urgent aim was to check ‘that the speed of environmental change does not outrun human adaptability and to sound the alarm when biological productivity can no longer support the growing human biomass’.⁹⁹ Kirk became a member of the IBP human adaptability sub-committee.¹⁰⁰ It would return him to an earlier social biology he had explored with Hogben, on community health equity.¹⁰¹

Social biology for a new age

When the Kirks returned to Australia in 1967, it was to Canberra. There, Robert Kirk became Senior Fellow (later Head), of the Human Genetics Group at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, ANU. He continued his population genetics studies, collaborating locally and internationally, steadily accumulating the vast collection of blood that was later embargoed. He also established an IBP project to investigate genetic diversity, physiological adaptation, demographics and health of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. When a typhoid outbreak occurred in Galiwin’ku (Elcho Island) off the coast of Arnhem Land, blood collected from the entire population was also distributed to Kirk. He co-ordinated assays for genetic markers, chromosomal studies, and viral antibodies. He similarly received blood from those involved in a yaws outbreak.¹⁰² Kirk’s population genetics and interest in human health began to converge.

All population geneticists were acutely aware of variant-linked inherited diseases. The classic example was haemoglobin homozygosity-related sickle-cell disease, and the protection against malaria that the heterozygotic state conferred. Phenylketonuria homozygosity was another. As one geneticist put it, most polymorphisms were ‘in search of a disease’, and inherited diseases were in search of not-yet-identified genes.¹⁰³ By co-ordinating the IBP Human Adaptability project, Kirk was exposed directly to the chronic health conditions of Indigenous Australians. They included infections (such as tuberculosis, leprosy, trachoma and hookworm), inherited conditions (like diabetes and cardiovascular disease), and malnutrition (that scourge of childhood).¹⁰⁴ Kirk expanded the scope of his genetic diversity research to include disease markers, particularly of diabetes, but also of other immune disorders and cancers.

Hogben and other interwar anti-racism biologists had argued that human diversity was beneficial. By 1972, population geneticists were able to examine that diversity in thirty-five blood group systems, and at least thirty serum proteins (including enzymes).¹⁰⁵ Overcoming methodological difficulties, geneticist Richard Lewontin quantified human diversity in a landmark study, finding that there was more genetic difference between individuals than between population groups. He advised that ‘Our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups … is indeed a biased perception’. Therefore, he concluded, ‘Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations’.¹⁰⁶ Through the 1970s, the language of genetic difference was refined to that of distance and kinship relationships, analysable by gradients of affinity and divergence.¹⁰⁷ Within a decade or so new molecular techniques would probe genes directly at the DNA level, completely transforming the field. The fundamental questions about the nature, pattern and mechanism of variation and evolution, the ‘relative importance and extent of intragroup as opposed to intergroup variation’, and the selective value of homozygosity versus heterozygosity, would persist.¹⁰⁸

Hogben had opposed interwar racism in South Africa, and in England he argued against Nazi race laws. In the 1960s, Kirk was drawn to support Indigenous civil rights in Australia, not through activism but through government channels. The year the Kirks arrived in Canberra, 1967, there was a referendum to transfer legislative power for Indigenous affairs from the states to the Commonwealth. It followed decades of cautious Indigenous activism that had intensified a few years prior to the referendum. For example, in 1963 the Yirrkala Bark Petition for Yolngu land rights was submitted to the seat of government, in 1965 the Freedom Ride protest travelled across NSW, and in 1966 the Wave Hill walk-off (Gurindji strike) demanded equal work conditions and return of land.¹⁰⁹ Like-minded black and white Australians forged partnerships in organisations like the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI) and the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and formed ground-breaking Aboriginal-led partnerships in legal and medical services.¹¹⁰

In 1972, the new Labor government of Gough Whitlam came into power with the slogan ‘It’s Time’ and change in mind. It was time to ratify the UN convention on human rights and racial discrimination, to end conscription for the Vietnam war and release conscientious objectors from prison, to implement education and health reforms and to increase funding to address Indigenous disadvantage.¹¹¹ Appointed as federal Minister of Aboriginal affairs was Gordon Bryant, a passionate advocate for land rights and a respected member of FCAATSI.¹¹² Kirk was already a Council Member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies and chairman of its Human Biology Advisory Committee. In 1973 he became an advisor to Bryant on Aboriginal Health, and the following year, to the Department of Health.¹¹³ His views on Aboriginal affairs accorded with the government’s progressive stance.

The provision of adequate medical care, and ‘equal opportunities for all members of society’ were aspects of the 1939 Geneticists’ Manifesto of which Lancelot Hogben was a signatory.¹¹⁴ The social context of health had interested Kirk when he worked with Hogben in the 1940s and in his subsequent research on genetic markers of diseases.¹¹⁵ Health was also a pillar of the Whitlam government election promises, one of four policy initiatives to improve Aboriginal lives.¹¹⁶ Whitlam committed to community consultation on all policies that affected Aboriginal people.¹¹⁷ And so, when Kirk convened a Study Group on Aboriginal Health, he invited medical officers and health experts from all over Australia, and representatives of the Aboriginal community.¹¹⁸ Together they evaluated medical problems (particularly malnutrition), and existing medical service and support models. The group noted the ‘depressed social condition’ of Aboriginal people, and they recognised that ‘community involvement in planning, development, implementation, and evaluation’ was essential for the success of programs. Additionally, they asserted that ‘significant permanent improvement of Aboriginal nutrition [would] only occur as Aboriginal people [regained] their pride, self-esteem and the right to self-determination’. The study suggested that one of the ways that might occur, was through the granting of land rights.¹¹⁹

Robert Kirk was a reserved man, and he worked through committees to effect change but his wife, Mildred, was a public advocate for Aboriginal rights, particularly through the Aboriginal Treaty Committee (ATC). The ATC was established in 1979, with the support of many prominent Australians. It was chaired by Dr Herbert Cole ‘Nugget’ Coombs, an economist, Reserve Bank governor and passionate advocate for Indigenous rights.¹²⁰ The ATC lobbied for the negotiation of a formal Treaty between the Australian government and Indigenous representatives chosen by their own community. Mildred Kirk wrote pamphlets explaining legislation for each state and territory, summarising Select Committee reports and distilling other land rights documents. As a collection, they highlight discrepancies between the state and territory laws, and the need for overarching Commonwealth legislation.¹²¹ She also wrote a book (her husband provided a photograph), explaining the history of invasion and settlement, and the impacts and need for a Makarrata (treaty).¹²² Land rights was the catch cry, but a protest poster proclaimed its broader meaning, including ‘self-determination’ and ‘a better future for black children’.¹²³ Lawyer Odette Mazel suggests that in an Australian context, self-determination ‘reflected ideas of collective participation, cultural distinctiveness, self-governance, free choice and freedom from discrimination’.¹²⁴

Kirk’s mentor Hogben opposed the wrong-headedness of racism; Kirk’s advocacy was to redress wrongs. Kirk wrote about the ‘devastation of conquest’ and the deterioration in Indigenous mental and physical health due to the loss of tribal lands and the changes in social, economic and ecological relationships. He applauded the Aboriginal-controlled health programs and referenced ‘a new social awareness of Aboriginal identity and a restoration of pride’.¹²⁵ Kirk acknowledged that Aboriginal origin stories were an alternative way of thinking about deep histories, and he recorded his ‘appreciation of the courteous co-operation’ of Aboriginal people who made genetic marker studies possible ‘over the last half century’.¹²⁶ It was a rare position for blood collectors of his era (although Trefor Jenkins may have been similarly oriented in a South African context).¹²⁷ In direct contrast, as Anderson demonstrated, for Joseph Birdsell, ‘population genetics became a method of ignoring contemporary Aboriginal degradation, suffering, and dispossession, of deflecting attention from the depredations of the settler sates, of effacing practices of resistance.’¹²⁸ Even though Birdsell rejected the anthropometry and ‘pure’ racial ancestry paradigm of his Harvard-based intellectual progenitor, Earnest A. Hooton, he still retained a racialised underpinning.¹²⁹ Sometimes the wafer-thin boundary between race and difference dissolved into convergence. Kirk had a different inheritance; he was the direct intellectual descendant of the anti-racism scientists of the interwar period. They discussed the theory of race, but Kirk had to work out how to undo race in his scientific practice through which he investigated the nature and extent of genetic kinship and diversity, mutation and adaptation. Even though he sometimes failed in that erasure, methodological conundrums did not obscure the reality for Kirk of the marginalisation of Indigenous lives.

Resolution

Robert Kirk’s support for Indigenous rights is unambiguous. Less so the status of his serum archive. Of the 100,000 vials of serum, plasma, blood clots and evaporated residue, approximately 7000 were from Indigenous people. Collected within the ethical norms of their time, his legacy collection became problematic a decade after Kirk’s 1987 retirement.¹³⁰ His serum archive was ensnared by multiple, complex ethical issues raised by a changed consent environment and the assertion of Indigenous ownership rights to that blood, its genetic material, and the history encoded within it.¹³¹ A compounding complication was the dramatic details revealed by the new genomics. When Kirk commenced his genetic research, a gene was an abstraction, the genetic code a decade from being deciphered, but in the 1990s, sophisticated bioinformatics revealed precise patterns of DNA sequence relationships and phylogenetic histories.¹³² Collected according to the consent protocols of their time—or really, lack of them—the remnant samples were now unusable for the futuristic genomics, accompanied as it was with newly applicable consent protocols.¹³³ In addition, the spectre of racialisation had re-emerged in genomics and the question of gene sequence ownership was newly confronted. How was the ANU to proceed?

The head of the Human Genetics Group, Simon Easteal, was unable to resolve how to respectfully realise the bio-value of the collection he had inherited, or alternatively, how to appropriately dispose of the samples. Considering the competing claims of cultural and scientific ethics, rights and responsibilities, the collection fell into disuse. The bio-specimens entered a voluntary research moratorium, suspended, as historian Joanna Radin and anthropologist Emma Kowal write, between ‘latent life’ and ‘incomplete death’.¹³⁴

In 2011, Easteal and Kowal entered a collaboration with Indigenous community representatives to determine the future of the serum archive. That consent conventions that applied at its collection were out of step with twenty-first century requirements was accepted, but crucially, had Kirk’s blood collecting been nefarious? Mick Gooda (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner at the time) and others, consulted Kirk’s serum and documentary archive, particularly the many photographs. They found no evidence there of coercion on the collecting expeditions. Additionally, several Indigenous people from whom blood had been taken were still alive—none provided evidence of harms or malpractice.¹³⁵ The conditions of collecting were deemed satisfactory for research to proceed.

In 2011, following careful consultation with representatives of Indigenous Australian communities, an alternative emerged: the establishment of an Indigenous-controlled organisation to manage the serum archive and its associated documentation, new blood collections, consent, research and repatriations. Gooda, who became the inaugural chair of the Indigenous Governance Board of the National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (NCIG) has spoken about its ‘immense cultural, historical and scientific importance’. For Indigenous communities involved with the NCIG, the collection’s value goes beyond the science itself, to its potential symbolism as ‘a watershed in the history of Indigenous research and bioethics’ in Australia.¹³⁶ The first of its kind, it is a model for Indigenous participation in the science of blood and inheritance.¹³⁷

As a result of that process of sharing and listening, in 2016 the serum archive was reanimated. The NCIG came into being with statutes enshrining Indigenous custodianship of the collection, and proper engagement with communities about past and future blood sample collection. That legal instrument ensures a majority Indigenous governance board that oversees a model of dynamic consent and appropriate use.¹³⁸ Some of the serum remnants have been stored too long to have any bio-value with current techniques. In what is considered by NCIG to be a huge success, some samples have been repatriated.¹³⁹ All research is conducted under strict protocols of community engagement, consent and ethics, ‘in line with customary laws and practices’, and in a culture of respect.¹⁴⁰ Obtaining consent is not a simple or quick process, and it is accompanied by complicated cultural implications, but the reciprocal process of engagement addresses and redresses elements of the past in the present, and offers an optimistic future. It presents a new iteration of the social biology introduced by Lancelot Hogben, carried forward by Robert Kirk, and passed on to the next generation of scientists.

In 2023, the NCIG published two papers in Nature on genomic variation in Indigenous people of northern and central Australia.¹⁴¹ Their long-read sequencing as well as consultation and consent methodologies belong to a twenty-first century iteration of population genetics. Those sophisticated methods of enquiry are incomparable to those used by Kirk, but the scientific questions are closely aligned. These new methods advance the understanding of human diversity, but also build towards equity in genomic medicine. Completing the circle, the research co-lead on one Nature project was Ira Deveson, Kirk’s grandson. It is not only Kirk’s intellectual legacy and inherited serum collection therefore, that are represented, but his own ‘blood’ descendance too.

This article on Kirk’s biological and social politics, continues the conversation about inherited human difference and racial categorisation. In it, we see the intertwining of blood science, race and political biology from the mid to the late twentieth century. It is a local case study, but one that reflects international developments in genetic technologies and ethics, and in social justice, and it challenges the presumption that a history of blood collecting is inevitably or solely one of scientific racism. On the contrary, this is rather more about scientific anti-racism, even if a flawed one. This is also a history about antecedents and descendants—of ideas, disciplines and politics as well as genetics. In the 1930s, Hogben and his peers used their science to argue against the concept of biological race. Kirk, as his intellectual descendent, tried to find an alternative organising principle for his population genetics studies. Educated in the 1940s and conducting genetic research from the 1950s through to the 1980s, Kirk’s professional career linked the well-known interwar anti-race biologists with post-war sciences, transporting population genetics into an era of explicit political anti-racism and involving himself in just that. This same span of decades also meant that Kirk’s particular mode of population genetics was superseded at the end of his career, his methods of data contribution rendered redundant by the DNA sequencing and bioinformatics of the next generation of scientists, including his grandson. Kirk made a modest contribution to international population genetics and to Australian Indigenous rights, but his greatest contribution—the one that appeared to be his most problematic at the end of the twentieth century—was a serum archive of Indigenous biospecimens. Its value was in its return to Indigenous control by the next generation of geneticists concerned with social justice and medical equity.