This talk takes up this puzzle, asking how and why neu has become a fixture of data-intensive human genetics despite the fact that the psychiatric concepts deployed in the clinic have long since evolved. By tracing the decision to collect neu data from midcentury twin registers into the UK Biobank and other gold-standard research infrastructures, I examine how the imperative to produce interoperable datasets creates infrastructural path dependencies that have the tendency to persist and deepen over time. In the process, I show how infrastructural interoperation has contributed to the prolongation of otherwise outdated—even eugenic—typologies of human difference into the present day.
H.J. Eysenck's Dimensions of Personality (1947)