The prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which houses the committee responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize in Medicine, will rename some of its premises and two streets that were named after racialist or pro-Nazi scientists, he announced on Tuesday. At the end of the work of a committee appointed last year by the research institute, the rector announced in a press release that he had decided to rename a room, a building and a street bearing the names of Anders Retzius (1796 -1860) and his son Gustaf (1842-1919). “
They represented values that are not aligned with the values that we as a university must carry,
” said “
KI
”
rector
Ole Petter Ottersen in an online video.
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If he has solid scientific work to his credit, Retzius senior is notably remembered for the “
cephalic index
”, a measure of the proportions of the skull, the source of racist hierarchies. Retzius, whose anatomico-racialist theories were pursued by his son, distinguished individuals with "
elongated
"
heads
, allegedly superior, from humans with "
short
" heads, classified as inferior. These theories, which earned KI to house a large collection of skulls, then fed the "
racial hygiene
" carried later by the Nazis. In this vein, the Karolinska Institute has also chosen to ask the city of Solna, where it has its headquarters near Stockholm, to rename “
rue von Euler
” to “
rue Ulf von Euler
”, Nobel Prize for Chemistry 1970.
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This was done in order to distinguish him from his father, Hans von Euler, a naturalized Swedish German and Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 1929, who had been an active member of a Swedish-German organization which had become pro-Nazi during the Reich era. The decision expected Tuesday is the consequence of debates launched in recent years on the historical heritage of the institute, on the initiative of students in particular. It had already resulted in the restitution of skulls, mainly from indigenous peoples, in Finland, French Polynesia, North America and Australia. "
We must not be embarrassed by a debate on names, by a debate on our past, it is a debate that we must have,
" argued Ottersen. "
We must remember the dark chapters of the past
",said the rector.