Professor Roberta Bivins, CHM Director, has had an article published in Contemporary Studies in Society and History.

Pilot Programs and Postcolonial Pivots: Pioneering 'DNA Fingerprinting' on Britain Borders

Developed in Britain and the United States in the 1980s, genetic profiling has since become a global technology. Today, it is widely regarded as the evidentiary “gold standard” in individual and forensic identification. However, its origins as a technology of post-empire at Britain’s externalized borders in South Asia have remained unexamined. This article will argue that the first state-sanctioned use of “DNA fingerprints,” a pilot program exploring its value in disputed cases of family reunification migration from Bangladesh and Pakistan to Britain’s postcolonial cities, repays closer examination. National and transnational responses to the advent of genetic profiling as an identification technology demonstrate the interplay between imperial and postcolonial models and networks of power and truth production. At the same time, this experiment prefigured and conditioned the wider reception of DNA profiling in matters of kinship. Far from being a footnote, the use of genetic profiling by migrants determined to exercise their legal rights in the face of a hostile state also worked to naturalize genetic ties as the markers of “true” familial relationships.

Dr Chris Sirrs, CHM postdoctoral researcher, has had a chapter he has written with Martin Gorsky at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, published in the latest volume of the Yearbook for the History of Global Development.

This is based partly on research he undertook at the World Bank archives in Washington DC and interviews with former Bank staff and explores the rationale behind the Bank’s controversial promotion of user fees for health services from the 1980s. The chapter is published open access.

Full citation: Martin Gorsky and Christopher Sirrs, ‘The World Bank’s Advocacy of User Fees in Global Health, c.1970–1997: More Ideology than Evidence?’, in Health and Development, ed. Iris Borowy and Bernard Harris, Yearbook for the History of Global Development 2 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023), 277–316, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111015583-011/html

Wellcome Trust-funded postdoctoral researcher Dr. Chris Sirrs has been cited in the latest ‘National State of Patient Safety Report’, drawn up by the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London. The authors have drawn upon Chris's NHS patient safety timeline in exploring the historical background to patient safety in Britain.

This report regularly informs debates both within the health service and in Parliament.

Read the report here