The European Society of Human Genetics: beginnings, early history and development over its first 25 years

Abstract

The European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) was founded on 15 March 1967, after preliminary discussions at the International Human Genetics Congress in Chicago the previous year and in Copenhagen in early 1967. Its initial meeting was held on 18–19 November 1967, also in Copenhagen, and annual meetings have been held from that time until the present, apart from years in which the International Congress of Human Genetics was also being held. The character of the Society during its early years was strongly influenced by its founding and permanent Secretary, Jan Mohr, head of the Copenhagen Institute of Medical Genetics, whose records are archived in the Tage Kemp/Jan Mohr Archive, now part of the Danish National Archives. These records show Jan Mohr’s determination to keep the activities of the Society limited to the holding of an annual meeting to enhance contacts between European human geneticists, and to resist expansion to other activities. Pressures for a wider role of ESHG became irresistible in the late 1980s and a revised constitution, adopted in 1991, reshaped the Society into a more conventional and less restrictive structure. This has allowed it to play a wider and increasingly influential role in the development of human and medical genetics across Europe, with its own Journal, a range of committees covering different aspects of the field and a series of valuable reports on specific important topics, to be described in a forthcoming article on the Society’s more recent history.