Genetic Automata

Captions and transcripts

This instrument measured and recorded head size and shape. It was used in Francis Galton’s first Anthropometric Laboratory, founded in 1884. Anthropometry involves the systematic measurement of humans’ physical features. Galton believed these to be indicators of ability and behaviour. He promoted the laboratory in the spirit of competition. People willingly submitted their data to find out how they contributed to the nation’s fitness. Galton would go on to conduct his later studies without his subjects’ knowledge.

Francis Galton designed this counting device to secretly study people in crowds. He would conceal it in his gloved hand or pocket and use a lever mechanism to categorise the people he observed as one of up to five ‘types’, depending on his focus of study. Each was activated by a different finger. Galton used a similar invention to sort women into three categories: ‘attractive’, ‘indifferent’ and ‘repugnant’. He applied his own assessment of beauty as an indicator of superior breeding potential. 

Phrenology is the false belief that skull shape determines personality and intellect. Phrenologist Robert Noel collected these busts to analyse the difference between criminals’ and intellectuals’ heads. According to Noel, the areas on criminals’ skulls indicating benevolence are small, while areas related to destructiveness are large. The criminals’ busts were cast after their execution and without consent. The intellectuals in Noel’s study were often his friends or celebrities of the day. Phrenology was highly fashionable in the early 1800s, but was already discredited as a science by the 1840s. Nevertheless, they found a home in Karl Pearson’s eugenics department, later the department of statistics.

This was cast from Francis Galton’s corpse so portraits could be made from it. Death masks were a commonplace Victorian practice for members of high society, and not necessarily related to phrenology. Galton did have his head measured by London’s Phrenological Institute as a young man. The results found him to be full of “self-will, self-regard and no small share of obstinacy” with undistinguished intellectual capabilities. This was perhaps why Galton himself did not subscribe to phrenology.

Francis Galton commissioned these photographic slides of Jewish school boys. He used them to supposedly demonstrate that Jewish people had distinct facial characteristics. Photographs of individuals were layered together to investigate a racialised ‘type’. The largest sample used as ‘evidence’ for this was just 13 boys. Conclusions based on these racist assumptions were shared widely and circulated in academic journals.   

Please be advised this case contains antisemitic content.

Karl Pearson and his research partner Margaret Moul used this eye colour gauge in a study of Russian and Polish Jewish school children living in the East End of London in the 1920s. They used eye colour, vision and intelligence tests to measure the eugenic worth of immigrant children. Their report was published as ‘The problem of alien immigrations into Great Britain’. Claiming to be an objective analysis of the effects of “indiscriminate immigration”, it fuelled antisemitic domestic policies.  

‘_GOD_MODE_’ considers the roots and implications of scientific racism. It explores how eugenic practices have left traces across society today, from education to medicine and politics.

The work’s title refers to a version of videogame play where the player is rendered invincible. It is filmed in two halves. The first half, voiced by David Blandy, alludes to the far-reaching consequences of Francis Galton’s eugenic legacy, including intelligence tests and laws governing reproductive rights. It features footage filmed at UCL’s Science Collection and the Wellcome Genome Campus, a centre for contemporary genomic research.

In the second half, voiced by Larry Achiampong, we enter a videogame environment and follow a huge spider as it travels through different landscapes. This references the West African folk legend of Anansi, a demi-god who changes form to achieve their aims. The narrative questions whether empathy is enough in the struggle against injustice and asks: what actions do we need to take to enact real world change?

The second film in the ‘Genetic Automata’ series questions the ethics behind advances in biological science and medicine.

It is told from the fictionalised viewpoint of Henrietta Lacks, a Black American woman whose cancer cells were taken without her or her family’s knowledge in 1951. Her cells became known anonymously as HeLa cells. They are considered to be immortal because they can replicate endlessly. Lacks’s cells have been used in some of the world’s most significant biomedical developments, including the polio and COVID-19 vaccines, and decoding the human genome.

The film references the controversial videogame Resident Evil 5, which is based on a plot about bio-terrorism in West Africa. It features Black people who appear as zombies that are designed to be killed repeatedly. The film draws parallels with the undying nature of the HeLa cell line and associated concerns about agency and consent.

Henrietta Lacks’s contributions to science are explored further in the ‘Being Human’ exhibition located on this floor.  

Sasha Henriques, Genetic counsellor and PhD candidate at Wellcome Connecting Science talks about race and genetics.

The third instalment of the series examines the tangled histories of archaeology, colonialism and eugenics.

It is grounded in correspondence between US sociologist and civil rights leader W E B Du Bois and Flinders Petrie, a British Egyptologist and archaeologist, exchanged in 1912. Petrie was closely associated with the eugenics movement at University College London. He believed there was a direct correlation between skull size, race and intelligence. He also used archaeology to justify colonialism. Petrie’s theories were rejected by Du Bois and other contemporaries, but embraced by the academic establishment at the time. He remains well respected as one of the founders of modern archaeology.

Larry Achiampong and David Blandy draw an analogy between archaeology and modern-day data-mining. Data-mining searches for patterns within large sets of information, such as in DNA databanks and algorithms used for social media. Both rely on fragments of evidence to construct origin stories about our past and present.

The initial chapter in Larry Achiampong and David Blandy's ‘Genetic Automata’ series investigates classification, categorisation and ordering of the natural world.

It highlights John Edmonstone, a formerly enslaved Black man living in Edinburgh, who taught taxidermy to Charles Darwin. Edmonstone gave Darwin the skills to preserve and study chaffinches from the Galapagos. This enabled Darwin to formulate the theory of natural selection. Edmonstone’s significance remains largely unacknowledged.

The film layers Darwin’s bird collection with the artists’ skin and animated avatars inspired by their own DNA ancestry results. Visually, it references videogames involving the misuse of genetic material, such as Metal Gear Solid and the Final Fantasy and Metroid series.

Ancestry testing kits are becoming increasingly popular. They are often promoted and discussed as if race has a biological basis. Yet scientists agree this is untrue. The film asks whether this ‘terrible fiction’ is any different from the scientific racism of the past.