Welcome to the Oral History of Human Genetics website.  Established in 2001, by Professor Edward R.B. McCabe, MD, PhD, at UCLA, the project is an interdisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration dedicated to the documentation and preservation of the history of the field of human genetics.

We are at a unique moment in history.  In the past 50 years, technological, intellectual, social, and cultural developments have transformed human genetics into one of the most respected fields in biomedical science and clinical medicine, one that has revolutionized the ways in which we understand health and disease.  At this moment, we have the opportunity to capture the memories and insights of those people who created and advanced this revolution.

With the creation of the OHHG Archive, we are designing a resource that will allow researchers now and in the future to gain new insights into the history of human genetics as it developed in the second half of the 20th century.  The core of the archive are oral histories with clinicians, scientists, theorists, ethicists, and legal experts that have been transcribed, annotated, and supplemented in an online searchable database accessible to researchers interested in the development of the field of human genetics.

This resource will enable researchers at all levels of expertise and from multiple fields to readily locate the information of interest to them and point them toward new questions, new hypotheses, and new meanings of the materials.

This project is a collaboration between historians of science at UCLA and Johns Hopkins University.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0551068 and the National Human Genome Research Initiative under Grant No. 003206. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Human Genome Research Initiative or of the National Science Foundation.