So, you want to build a better baby. While many who have tried in the past have done so for not-so-good reasons, today’s emerging technology — while not capable of producing fully customized super-offspring — does allow us to maximize certain traits while minimizing certain risks. Today’s guest, Emily Merchant, walks us through the history, potential, and current state of genetic sciences.   

Bio: Emily Merchant is a historian of science and technology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the quantitative human sciences and technologies of human measurement. Her current project, Molecular Eugenics, combines archival research, oral history, and computational textual analysis to develop an intellectual, institutional, and material history of the genetic and genomic social sciences since the mid-twentieth century, and their contribution to eugenic projects in the postgenomic era. Her first book, Building the Population Bomb (Oxford 2021), examines how human population growth became a subject of scientific expertise and an object of governmental and philanthropic intervention in the twentieth century. Her research has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, International Migration Review, and Population Research and Policy Review, as well as the production of public-use datasets for historical demography and environmental history.

Publications: 

• Emily Klancher Merchant. 2022. Environmental Malthusianism and Demography. Social Studies of Science 52(4): 536-560.
• Emily Klancher Merchant and Carrie S. Alexander. 2022. Demography in Transition. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 55(3): 168-188.
• Emily Klancher Merchant. 2021. Building the Population Bomb. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Emily Klancher Merchant. 2021. American Demographers and Global Population Policy in the Postwar World. Modern American History 4(3): 239-261.
• Emily Klancher Merchant. 2021. Assessing the Demographic Consequences of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Pp. 37-41 in Covid-19 and the Global Demographic Research Agenda, ed. Landis MacKellar and Rachel Friedman. New York: Population Council.
• Projit Bihari Mukharji, Myrna Perez Sheldon, Elise K. Burton, Sebastián Gil-Riaño, Terence Keel, Emily Klancher Merchant, Wangui Muigai, Ahmed Ragab, and Suman Seth. 2020. A Roundtable Discussion on Collecting Demographics Data. Isis 111(2): 310-353.
• Myron P. Gutmann and Emily Klancher Merchant. 2019. Historical Demography. Pp. 669-695 in Handbook of Population, Second Edition, ed. Dudley L. Poston, Jr. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature.