Propelled by tech money, the menace of race science is back – and it’s just as nonsensical as ever | Adam Rutherford

Once thought extinct after the fall of empire, this debunked practice has re-emerged with support from rogue experts and rich backers

Civilisation is going to pieces ... if we don't look out the white race will be - will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved." Sentiments like this will be familiar to those who lurk in the less wholesome corners of the internet, where racism and other bigotries flourish. As a geneticist who specialises in racism and eugenics, I lurk so that you don't have to.

However, this particular phantom threat comes from Tom Buchanan, Daisy's brutish husband, barking these unsolicited words at supper in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby. F Scott Fitzgerald paints a picture of upper-class ghouls that is fundamentally accurate: eugenics, race and the menace of immigrants were defining campaigning issues in Jazz-era America, as they were in Edwardian Britain.

Dr Adam Rutherford is a lecturer in genetics at UCL and the author of How to Argue With a Racist

This article was updated on 18 October 2024 to add details of partners participating in a recent Guardian investigation into a race science" network.