Warning: This article discusses blood collecting in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It also contains the image of an unnamed Aboriginal man who may be deceased.

It is not without justification that the collecting of blood for genetic analysis is frequently associated with race science, but it is not solely or inevitably so. This history of Robert Kirk, a British–Australian population geneticist, confronts blood collecting in the twentieth century. Other histories have analysed the conflation of race with the science of inheritance in the first half of the twentieth century, and of the re-emergence of race in genomics at century’s end. Kirk’s practice of blood analysis and his support for Indigenous rights intercalates those periods, bridging interwar anti-racist theoretical geneticists, and late twentieth century genomic scientists. Through Kirk’s research activities we learn about the twinning of blood science and progressive politics, and the challenges and intersections that posed. Through Kirk’s legacy collection of blood samples now returned to Indigenous control, we see the potential transmutation of a problematic past into a promising future.

警告：本文讨论了原住民和托雷斯海峡岛民的血液采集。它还包含一位可能已故的未命名原住民男子的图像。

采集血液进行基因分析经常与种族科学联系在一起，这并非没有道理，但并非唯一或不可避免。英国-澳大利亚群体遗传学家罗伯特·柯克 （Robert Kirk） 的这段历史面临着 20 世纪的血液采集问题。其他历史分析了 20 世纪上半叶种族与遗传科学的混为一谈，以及本世纪末种族在基因组学中的重新出现。柯克的血液分析实践和他对原住民权利的支持贯穿了这些时期，为两次世界大战之间的反种族主义理论遗传学家和 20 世纪末的基因组科学家架起了桥梁。通过 Kirk 的研究活动，我们了解了血液科学和进步政治的孪生关系，以及由此带来的挑战和交叉点。通过柯克遗留下来的血液样本收集现在归还给原住民控制，我们看到了有问题的过去可能转变为充满希望的未来。