Treasury of Human Inheritance, a series published from 1909 to 1958, represents an important milestone in the history of genetics. This project—co-published as Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs, which, even more confusingly, also served as Treasury's parent publication for a time—was overseen by Karl Pearson, a leading biostatistician and eugenicist. Treasury of Human Inheritance sought to compile and analyse family pedigrees in order to illustrate the inheritance of physical and mental diseases in humans; the initiative sprang from of a need for hard empirical evidence to support studies in heredity.
During the first half of the twentieth century, access to such information was very limited, and Pearson's object was to standardise the data collected. Treasury's evolution into an independent series reflected the growing emphasis on, and appetite for, genetic research. However, Treasury—as the title of its sometime sister journal makes clear—is also bound to the murky field of eugenics, a sub-Darwinian belief system that aims to improve the human gene pool via selective breeding. Nowadays, eugenics is rightly debunked, but the import attached to Treasury is a reminder that this outré theory was once considered a credible one.
For all its experimental form, Alexis Kyle Mitchell's film The Treasury of Human Inheritance—note the subtle use of the definite article, which is very handy when it comes to differentiating the movie from its near-namesake periodical—is an intensely personal work centring on myotonic dystrophy (DM), a hereditary muscle-wasting genetic disorder whose potency increases as it is passed on. Via a dissonant combination of home movies, Zoom calls, and footage of derelict buildings, Canadian artist Mitchell poignantly depicts the ravages of this disease, which has affected three generations of the filmmaker's family.
The film is propelled along by a throbbing synth soundtrack which, as per Mitchell's stated intention, approximates particular patterns of genetic conditions. This approach to sound design adds a haptic, visceral element to the work that complements the tactile 16mm cinematography; as much as Mitchell's film provides real insight into life with DM, it is also an experience, and a highly sensorial one at that. The Treasury of Human Inheritance is a peculiar nexus of art and science, one which confronts the stark realities of disease, death and dying—not as alien concepts, but rather as integral aspects of the human condition.
