142 Book Reviews operating to produce a linear sequence. A different non-semantic sense of ‘information’ is that used in assessing the accuracy of the transmission of electrical signals (Garcı́a- Sancho, p. 65), which Crick claims did not influence him. A final sense of ‘information’ is that used in the later chapters to refer to any item entered into and processed by a computer program. In sum, readers seeking an intellectual and institutional biography of Sanger’s work on sequencing or the early UK perspective on databases, algorithms and machines for sequencings will find it in Garcı́a-Sancho’s book. Lindley Darden University of Maryland, USA doi:10.1017/mdh.2016.115 C. F. Goodey, Learning Disability and Inclusion Phobia: Past, Present, Future (Oxon, and New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. viii, 178, £79.00, hardback, £25.49 kindle, ISBN: 978-0-415-82200-8 (hbk) and 978-0-203-55665-8 (ebk). In his book, Goodey Goodey makes the point that the term ‘learning disability’ is not a fixed, stable concept, but one which has changed and evolved over time. He states his aim as being to not only deconstruct the concept of a learning disability but also to ‘reconstruct the concept as something else entirely’ (p. 2). He argues that learning disabilities are as a consequence of an inclusion phobia which he defines as, a condition which has existed since time immemorial resulting in the identifying and scapegoating of outgroups. He states therefore that social inclusion should be our target in both social and political action. He argues that although we think about ‘learning disabilities’ as being fixed and permanent, a learning disability is in fact a label which shifts over time. For example, he discusses how a previous label applied to this group, ‘feeble-minded’ would have included many groups of people (such as unmarried mothers) who would not be included within our current concept of a learning disability. Goodey cites many examples of inclusion phobia in action, including ‘mild’ phobias such the person in the bank who talks to the member of a person’s support staff rather than the person being supported by the member of staff, tracing this concept through history. In a recent commentary on Goodey’s paper on why we should study the history of learning disability, Bradshaw and McGill point out that staff can also be instigators of social exclusion.1 In this research, the regard for residents was one dimension which emerged from their evaluation of staff culture. This dimension focused on the extent to which people with learning disabilities were seen as being fundamentally different, or as the authors describe in the paper ‘not like us’. This seems to be a very clear illustration of Goodey’s inclusion phobia. He argues that this concept of inclusion phobia pre-exists the label of learning disability. He suggests that classifying a human group by their intellectual abilities is the current method by which this inclusion phobia is manifested. He argues that this representation of status by reference to an internal characteristic of ‘intelligence’ is recent. 1 C.F. Goodey, ‘Why study the history of learning disability?’, Tizard Learning Disability Review 20, (2015): 3–10; J. Bradshaw and P. McGill, ‘Commentary on “Why study the history of learning disability?”’ Tizard Learning Disability Review 20 (2015): 11–14; C. Bigby, M. Knox J. Beadle-Brown, T. Clement and J. Mansell, ‘Uncovering dimensions of informal culture in underperforming group homes for people with severe intellectual disabilities’, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities 50 (2012): 452–67. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2016.115 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:18:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1017/mdh.2016.115&domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2016.115 https://www.cambridge.org/core Book Reviews 143 Goodey suggests that the discrimination, bullying and segregation of people who we label as having learning disabilities are the result of this inclusion phobia. Recent work around hate crime (Richardson et al., 2015) found that just under half of the people with learning disabilities and/or autism who took part in their survey reported experiences of disability hate crime and so Goodey is quite right to point out that this is one of the ways in this group is targeted as ‘different’. Difference is the focus of his fourth chapter.2 Of course it is also the case that staff working with this group of people are often excluded (Bradshaw and McGill, 2015), for example because of their association with people with learning disabilities. Beadle-Brown et al. (2014) found that people who were living or working with this socially excluded group also reported victimisation. Goodey’s book explores the concept of causes, tracing these through history, culminating in parental blame and guilt and finally to the location of learning disability entirely within DNA, therefore locating ‘the problem’ within the child himself or herself. In his chapter on assessment, Goodey argues that we assess what we feel is measurable, hence intelligence becomes something which we assess and therefore refer to as ‘real.’ Finally, he explores his notion of inclusion phobia through the development of the classification and diagnosis of autism spectrum conditions. Goodey ends by suggesting that a solution would be for all ‘vulnerable’ people to be supported by their local communities (as would have been the case historically) and suggests that services are actively contributing to the prevention of people being able to lead ordinary lives. He ends with stating that ‘Inclusion is not a good idea that needs to be promoted, it is the state of nature’ (p. 166). It is the in ingroup, those who do the excluding, where policy change must be targeted. Jill Bradshaw University of Kent, UK doi:10.1017/mdh.2016.116 Loren Graham, Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 209, $24.95, hardback, ISBN: 9780674089051. In 1948, at the end of a week-long session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) in Moscow, Trofim D. Lysenko announced that he had received the support of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for his anti-genetic theories. What followed was not just a purge of genetics and geneticists across the Soviet Union, but the rest of the Communist Bloc as well. Lysenko seemed to have succeeded, as one author put it, in ‘set[ting] the clock back’ by renouncing the most important advance in twentieth-century biology. A lost generation of would-be geneticists were forced to follow other paths of research, and by the time it was over there was a palpable sense of having been left behind. What they were now free to discover was a genetics that to a large extent had been developed in reaction to Lysenko’s crime of exploiting his connections in a totalitarian political system in order to escape having to subject his theories to the judgement of his peers. Historians of the Lysenko controversy owe an enormous debt to Loren Graham. The chapter where Graham covered what was at the time a recent event in Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (1966), was part of the first wave of literature on what 2 L. Richardson, J. Bradshaw, J. Beadle-Brown, A. Malovic and J. Himmerlich, “‘I felt that I deserved it”: Experiences and implications of Disability Hate crime’, Tizard Learning Disability Review, 21 (2016) 80–88. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2016.115 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:18:38, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2016.115 https://www.cambridge.org/core *-2.9pc