Why the claims about Hitler’s genome are misleading

0:00Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College Deal. Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox Wireless Controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college pc. Now this week sees the broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK of a documentary called Hitler's DNA, Blueprint of a Dictator. Geneticists have managed to find a DNA sample from Adolf Hitler, sequenced it, verified it, and now we have his genome.

0:46The big question is what does this really tell us and what can we tell from someone's genome? And that's what we're getting into on this special episode of The World, the Universe and Us from New Scientist. I'm Dr Rowan Hooper and I'm joined by two of the lead figures on the documentary. Thuri King is a geneticist at the University of Bath. She's best known for the identification of the remains of Richard III a few years back now. And Alex Kay is a historian of Nazi Germany based at Potsdam University in Germany. Welcome both. Hello. Thank you, Rowan. Now, Thuri, on the show, you say you agonised about joining this project.

1:21And I just want to ask why. That's the question everyone's asking. Why do this? I did agonize about it, and that's because of who it is. Now, the thing is, is there's been thousands of archaeological and historical specimens that have been, had their genome sequencing, including Beethoven. Then it's a case of, so why should Hitler be any different? He's, you know, he's not some sort of mystical person. Why should we put him on a pedestal? And the other thing was, is the sample was available. And so somebody is going to do this. So we might as well do it in the most rigorous scientific fashion that we can.

1:58So that was what decided me to get involved in the project. Yeah. I mean, what that makes me think straight away is Beethoven didn't order the deaths of six million Jews and countless other millions of other people and the risk. And it comes straight from the top with the title of the documentary Blueprint of a Dictator. the very real risk is that people might think there's a deterministic line between what's in his genome and that there's this blueprint, which geneticists don't use that phrasing to describe what a genome does. So that's a real risk, isn't it? Of course, and obviously I didn't name the documentary.

2:42And that is one of the things that I'm at pains to get across, is that as a geneticist, I'm the first person who will tell you that DNA is not deterministic. It can tell us certain things, but not others. It can tell us about genetic predispositions. There are certain conditions where we know it's down to one gene. But for the majority of conditions, it's both polygenic, so many genes, and multifactorial. So it's things like life events, diet, all sorts of environmental factors that come into play into whether or not you're actually going to develop a particular condition. So yes, I am the first person to say that we have to be careful with what we can and cannot say from somebody's genome.

3:22Alex, I guess it's literally your job to dig through this period of history. So were there any qualms for you or was it less of a problem in your head? My only concern was that the production company and Channel 4 don't approach this in a sensational way, that they really follow the science. and to be honest from the very first meeting i had with blink films with dan chambers the creative director more than two and a half years ago i just had a really good feeling that everybody involved was going to be serious about it was only going to put this program out there once we had the evidence once we had the facts and and you know that feeling that i had that very first meeting continued throughout the process throughout the filming throughout the production process.

4:10And actually, Dan said to me in the first meeting, when I kind of raised the objection, genetics can't tell us everything, he said, great. That's exactly what we want to hear from the lead historian on this program. We want the historian to say, well, it's not just black and white. There are also gray areas. I can back that up as well, because that was one of the first things that I said to Dan, who's had a blink, was I won't do this if you're going to do it in a sensationalist way. And they do allow us to put in all of the caveats as we go through about this is not diagnostic. This is much more clear cut.

4:45This really isn't. And so it was really important that we do it in a sort of measured way. Of course, it's television. So what they're interested in is, okay, so we've got these genetic results. What would that mean for Hitler? How would that potentially manifest itself. And of course, as a geneticist, it's interesting because when you look at the medical biographers, the things that we are finding genetic predispositions for are things that they've kind of tried to diagnose him with. And even during his lifetime, I understand that schizophrenia was mooted as a possible diagnosis. Having Alex is very important on the program.

5:22Yeah. And I think this is a really important point that Turing makes that we're not the first people to talk about this, right? There's been speculation about Hitler having certain disorders for decades, in fact, already during his own lifetime, right? So had we not done this program, people would still be talking about it. However, this program gave us the opportunity to do it in a really scientifically solid way. There's good reason why the program has been eight years in the making. We didn't want to put it out there until the test results, the findings were clear. Yeah, well, then perhaps I could have waited a bit longer until the paper was out as well.

5:58And then it would have been even more rigorous. Yeah, I tried really, really hard to link. And that was one of the first things I said, I'm not doing this in isolation. It has to be an academic paper. And I have been working incredibly hard to try and get those two things linked. But as you'll know, I don't have any control over when a paper comes out, and I don't have control over the documentary when that comes out. So it's a case of doing the best we can to put the two as close as possible. I think there's a bit in the documentary where you say a lot of labs in Europe wouldn't touch it, and the actual analysis ended up being done in a lab in the US.

6:39Is that right? Yeah. So the two labs that did it were in the US. I was obviously wanted to make sure that the work is, the sequencing is done in two separate labs. So not only for the identification, but also for, you know, you worry about things like contamination, are you getting the same results in both labs? But labs in this country were not keen. Well, they would be very interested when you first chat to them. And then they would go and talk to board members or whatever. And then they would go, actually, no, we don't want to. And I can understand that. It's an incredibly difficult subject to do, but I don't think that it would be right to make him somebody special that we would never do this to.

7:24That feels wrong to me. Why is it okay to do some people's genomes and not others? That would seem an odd thing to do. Yeah. And did you, I just wondered personally what it was like kind of handling his DNA. Were you able to? I didn't. Okay. So it wasn't you personally doing it? No, it was done in two separate labs in the US. And you see one of those geneticists. This is Danny Helwig. You see him in the documentary and they are one of the labs that do the work on it. so my basically my role is overseeing the whole project and going right we this needs to be done and this needs to be done and then what can we tell from so i do a little bit of analysis because obviously i've got expertise in sort of y chromosome and um and sort of mitochondrial dna and you know a little bit around her genome but then it's a case of doing it in two separate ways because we want it to be really rigorous the first is we're not looking for anything let's just run it through sort of standard nhs pipelines what what's ticking up as variants with that.

8:26And then also because, as Alex says, there's been so much interest in Hitler's health. What about particular things that might be of interest? And this is where people like at the Pasteur Institute who work on genes to do with sexual development. And the reason to send it to experts is that obviously it's not everything's published. They might have something in the pipeline where they're going, oh, this hasn't been published yet, but we've spotted this. As it was, what they spotted was this deletion in Proc 2, which is incredibly rare, but well characterized as being associated with Kalman syndrome and congenital hypogonadotropism, hypogonadism.

9:04Very catchy. But both of them are, they're characterized by low testosterone levels, delayed or absent development in puberty. In five to 10 % of cases, there's a micropenis. So it's telling us something, well, within limits as to what his genitalia might look like. And this is where it's incredibly important, like having Alex in here, is because what does history already tells us certain things, which Alex, well, I'm sure will tell you about. So to see this and to know the historical kind of documentation and kind of, you know, some of its rumor around that, it suggests a causal relationship.

9:42It doesn't tell us exactly what his genitalia looks like. Yeah. But it's certainly, it was a gasp moment when you're doing the work and you go, oh my goodness, he has a really well-known deletion that's associated with genital development. I had a look at that and as far as I could see, there are five genes at least known to be associated with Kalman's and we've got a deletion in one. It's an artesomal dominant. Okay. And so we've got a deletion in that PROC2 gene. And then in people diagnosed with Kalman's, in 5 % to 10%, there is this micropenis. And yet already that's what the papers have gone with today.

10:25So I'm just worried about, again, the line we're drawing between this one deletion when it's a complex, at least five genes associated with it. The micropenis thing is a minority of those ones. And then we're leaping straight ahead. So that's where we can keep the guardrails on. It is autosomal dominant, so it is well characterized. But as you'll know, the phenotype, how that kind of manifests itself, varies between individuals. And we also talk about that. And we're very clear that we cannot say this for certain, what his genitalia looks like. I never thought I'd be talking about Hitler's genitalia.

11:05Anywho, we can then kind of married up with the historical information and what is that telling us so yes you're right we we can't stop people from going further some people will but all we can do as scientists is make sure that we are doing everything we can like doing this program to keep the guardrails on about what we can and cannot say yeah I just want to echo theory that were obviously not responsible for what aspects of the findings the newspapers choose to focus on. This was slightly predictable. I think that some of them would focus on these more frivolous aspects. What is really interesting for me as a historian, in terms of the Kalman's finding, is that Hitler's private life has obviously been discussed a lot.

12:00and his private life is quite striking because he basically didn't have one right so we don't really have any evidence that hitler had any type of intimate or sexual relationships throughout his life there's no hard evidence for that so why was this is obviously the question because if you look at the other uh senior nazi leaders goering himler goebbels borman speer the list goes on they all had wives they all had children many of them had extramarital affairs etc hitler doesn't is a real outlier in that sense. So that requires explanation because Hitler demonstrates an almost complete devotion to politics that none of the other Nazi leaders do, which means Hitler was, in that sense, predestined almost to become this central figure of the Nazi movement.

12:48And I don't really see any other figure who could have taken his place. And he was indeed the undisputed leader of Germany for 12 years. So there it becomes very interesting for the historian, how can we explain this complete absence of a private life and complete absence of relationships? Well, he had Eva Braun and other sort of girlfriends, right? Yes. I mean, there's definitely lots of interest from women. We already know in his youth, there's this account written by probably his only friend during adolescence, August Kubitschek, who emphasizes that many women were interested in Hitler, but he didn't appear are interested in them and yes he has companions and i think with with his half niece uh gilio elbow there's a some kind of obsession there on hitler's part and they have if a brown is a companion i mean it's very difficult to know the exact reasons for that but the point is that there's no actual evidence that theirs was a sexual relationship or an intimate relationship in that sense i think she was more of a companion so yeah so that's where it becomes really interesting for historians that maybe now we have evidence of why this might have been, together with all of the kind of historical documentation and witness accounts that we already have.

14:00Let's talk about some of the other aspects of the study and the polygenic risk score analysis. So that estimates someone's disease risk based on genetic variants in a population. So if you have a population and you look at those who, say, have heart disease or a kind of cancer, and then you look at the gene variants they have, you can start to associate certain variants with the disease. So you get an indication of risk. And you've looked at the polygenic risk score for Hitler for schizophrenia, ADHD, and autism. And I wondered if you could take us through some of those, perhaps, Chiuri. So this is a team at Arcus University, the iSYC study.

14:39So again, what they did was, as you say, you take somebody's genetic data and from the genetic variants that you carry, you try to place them on that spectrum in terms of they have a number of genetic variants that predispose towards versus, no, they have very few, if not any of them. And this was, again, another striking thing. And again, one of those things that we absolutely have to put the guardrails in for is that he comes in the top 1 % when compared to the Danish population for schizophrenia, autism, and bipolar. this was striking with all the caveats involved that it is not diagnostic you cannot diagnose somebody with this in fact we for the paper we do the calculation and there's a five percent chance that he would have been diagnosed with any one of these disorders in his lifetime so we have to be extremely careful but again it's striking they've never seen anybody who has got is in the top one percent for all three of those disorders.

15:37You get one or two, but never three. So he's, he is a genetic outlier. And again, with all of the caveats in about how this is not diagnostic, and we have to be extremely careful what we say from the DNA, of course it is striking given who he is. But again, the other thing, and Alex will talk about this, is Hitler's not on his own. He's doing this, you know, with hundreds of thousands of people who are helping him. Genetics is a tiny, tiny part of the puzzle of who somebody is, is going to be affected from, you know, life events. And we know that he had very, you know, strong adverse life events, which again, Alex can chat about.

16:18But, you know, everything from environment and diet, everything, you know, is involved in shaping who you are. And he's living in a time where you have got things like eugenics is considered to be almost a kind thing to do. I mean, you look at it now and just, oh my, oh my goodness. But the anti-Semitism was also rife. So what we say is kind of that Hitler is really a unique constellation in terms of his genetics, but also his upbringing and the environment that he was living in terms of society and temporal at the time. And that's what all comes together to make him this sort of outlier in history.

16:55I just still, again, worry that we're putting too much emphasis on the genetics when I know you've said that there's these caveats that it's not a diagnosis. And we have Simon Baron-Cohen from Cambridge saying, almost as a slip of the tongue saying, we can't reduce, well, we don't want to reduce behavior to genetics. But he says we can't reduce his behavior to these diagnoses. And then there's the psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald who just says people with ADHD like Hitler, we've just said he does not, we don't know. You've said there's a 5 % chance. it's not diagnostic. We can't say he had those conditions.

17:37And then again, people with these conditions are going to be stigmatized, aren't they? Well, that's the other thing that we've been really kind of trying to be clear about, is that people with these conditions very rarely go on to commit violent acts, let alone genocide. They're more likely to be on the receiving end of these. And yes, there is this difficulty, and we're trying very hard as genetics and Alex's as well to talk about how DNA is only a part of the picture. We cannot say that he had ADHD. Now, they're coming at it from a different angle because they're looking at him historically and going, well, actually, he does have some ADHD traits.

18:17They've done it as psychiatrists and they've gone, well, if I was looking at this person in my clinic, I would think that they might have schizophrenia or whatever. So it's the the making sure that we don't do a straight line from the genetics to those diagnoses. But what becomes interesting is that from the genetic data, you have this genetic predisposition that's not diagnostic, but you also have people on the other side looking at his behavior and going, well, actually, I would have diagnosed him with something like that and making sure that there's not a straight line between the two, but just that you place them sort of side by side in terms of trying to look at Hitler through these two sort of lenses.

18:58I think obviously all of us who are involved in the program have a responsibility to portray this in an accurate way and in a nuanced way and with all the context. But I also think that anybody watching the program and then commenting on it, writing about it, any journalists, they also have a responsibility not to take these results and these findings out of context, not to overemphasize one aspect in a way that we don't in the program and not to stigmatize people who have these disorders i think the program does a really good job of marrying genetics and history and contextualizing everything you know we talk a lot in the program about hitler's childhood his upbringing how he had a very traumatic childhood how he was the victim of abuse how he was surrounded by death at an early age you know four of his five siblings died both his parents died by the time he was 18.

19:51So I think we're very clear on that point that genetics is only one small part of the jigsaw puzzle, right? But it is quite a remarkable part of the jigsaw puzzle because it does provide a new layer of understanding to all the other historical documents that we had on Hitler. All of the speeches and the photographs and the film footage we never had this dna so we can add this to what we already knew we're not just looking at this dna on its own we're looking at it in the light of everything else that we know okay look the cat is out the bag now you know the the paper is yet to come but it is already out there um as you say journalists have a responsibility to report this as accurately as they can and that's what we're trying to do so thanks for coming on the podcast to to talk about this today uh chiri king and Alex Kay.

20:42Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Rowan.

21:11a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Listening to that was reporter Michael LePage. Michael, you've seen the documentary, I've seen it, and you've also reported on that. What are your thoughts after that interview? Well, the thing that really struck me was that Thierry King said, with these conditions where Hitler's polygenic risk was in the top 1%, there was still only a 5 % chance that he would have been diagnosed with these conditions. Now, just to put that in context, I think if you watch the television documentary, first of all, that number's not there. And in fact, I think you come away with quite a different impression.

21:49I think you come away with the impression that these genetic results are somehow confirming that he did have autism and schizophrenia and these other conditions. I think it sort of suggests, well, this is the proof. It's not said as much, but I think that's a general impression you're left with. so it's it's strange to me that that only a five percent risk of him actually being diagnosed with any of those conditions that that wasn't in the actual documentary maybe it would have spoiled the story i mean they said they said in the interview you know there we we want to make this caveat that biology doesn't always lead to behavior or there's no straight line between biology and behavior but you just that's what what people come away with there's that uh that Michael Fitzgerald, who just said, states on the documentary there that Hitler had ADHD.

22:39And then, you know, Simon Baron Cohen calls it a diagnosis as well. Yeah, I think that's the trouble is the overall message of this documentary. As you're saying, you've got the title blueprint of a dictator. It claims this is going to change the way we think about Hitler. at some point the narrator says, well, can we now finally understand history's worst dictator? And that's all giving this impression that somehow Hitler's DNA is telling us more than we would know just from watching the man himself. But the opposite is true. You know, as Cherry King was saying at the beginning, in most cases, DNA is not deterministic.

23:23There are only a few conditions where it's very straightforward. In most cases, it's all got to do with the environment and the interaction between genes and environment and it's incredibly complicated and it's not a deterministic thing. I think probably the easiest way to understand this is to think about what would happen if we created clones of Hitler. Some people may remember the film Boys from Brazil, this was the plot of that. What would those clones be like? And we can get an idea of the answer to that by looking at twin studies. These are the studies where you say how much of a condition is genetic or environmental by looking at identical twins and comparing them with less identical twins that is fraternal twins.

24:01Now, there are lots of problems with these studies because most twins grow up in the same home, so you can't really fully disentangle the genetics and environment. But what we see very clearly is that with most conditions, you know, the genetics plays only a small role. So I was looking up yesterday, so criminality is something that people have tried to look at the sort of genetic component of that i think that's a bit dubious but even so the highest estimates in the literature are less than 50 so i think i think you can safely say from twin studies clones of hitler's hitler would not be evil dictators yeah there's no genetic determinism yeah exactly and like despite what they've said um and you know churi king is a is a legitimate scientist, the way it comes across in the documentary, people will walk away from that thinking that genetic determinism is a thing.

24:54I think that's the danger. I think that is a message that people are left with. And, you know, they said that they can't control how journalists report it. But then should you have done a documentary in the first place? Should you have sequenced the DNA in the first place? I mean, I think these are debatable questions at best yeah i mean i can see why you would if you had the chance find out something more about someone so pivotal to history and like she said you know we've sequenced beethoven i didn't know we'd done that actually but beethoven's genome and various other historical figures so i think there is a case to be made for sure for doing it in a paper but in a documentary like this and there's some aspects of it which are fairly straightforward for instance you know there's a rumor that uh one of hitler's grandfathers was was jewish ancestry yeah and this result suggests that that's not the case that's fairly straightforward ancestry tracing i think that's actually fine but then to look at these sort of conditions like autism and schizophrenia and things like that and try and say he did or he did or he didn't yeah i think that's more problematic and as i said to them during that interview there is a very real risk of people with those conditions all of them kalman syndrome onwards uh autism adhd schizophrenia you know these people are real i think they're at real risk of being stigmatized there was with the kalman syndrome stuff i felt a sort of ableist feeling being there when they're talking about it they're repeating that Hitler song from the Second World War.

26:39I think during the wartime, there's a reason for using that kind of propaganda against your enemy. I'm not so happy about hearing it now. No, I think it is a definite issue. And I had a quick scan through social media in response to this, and that's definitely coming up. So I think this is going to be a real problem in the coming days and weeks. Yeah, the stigma that could be on. So that's something to guard on. All that said and done, Hitler didn't work alone. We mentioned the other generals all around him. But it wasn't just that. It was the population. He was elected. It was facilitated by a whole environment, wasn't it?

27:20Exactly. I think no one can do these things on their own. It's all about the people who work with them, enable them to come to power, enable them to seize power, and who carry out all the atrocities are on their behalf. There's a much wider social and historical issue here. It's not just about one man. That we should not paper over at all by just focusing on this sort of neat story of genetics. Exactly. I think focusing on one man can take our attention away from what really matters and what's happening in the world today. Good. We'll leave it there. That's all for this week. Thanks to our guests, Michael LePage and Thury King and Alex Kay.

28:03This is The World, The Universe and Us, and we'll be back next week. Bye for now. Bye.

28:29article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.