The introduction and early development of the genetic sciences in modern Iran coincided with the country’s tumultuous transition from decentralized, multi-ethnic empire to authoritarian nation-state under the Pahlavi dynasty. In the 1930s, Reza Shah sent hundreds of Iranian students to European universities and welcomed dozens of European, especially French and German, scientists to help modernize Iranian higher education. These academic ties, alongside Nazi cultural diplomacy, fomented a fascination with Aryan race theory among the Persian-speaking Iranian elite. Unsurprisingly, as freshly trained Iranian biologists and anthropologists applied Western-style methodologies like anthropometrics and population genetics to the study of their own people, their scientific enterprise became tightly entwined with the Pahlavi regime’s political goals of constructing an Aryan, European-oriented national identity for Iran. Through analysis of the research publications of Iranian scientists working between 1935-1979, I demonstrate that they routinely structured their research questions and conclusions based on the unquestioned assumptions of the nationalist narrative of the Aryan invasion of the Iranian plateau. Studies on non-Persian Iranian populations, including Jews and Arabs, were conducted to determine how these groups were related to the “default” Persian-Aryan ethnicity. While the 1979 revolution promised to eliminate the overt structures of ethnic discrimination against non-Persians and attempted to eradicate Pahlavi Aryanism in favor of an Islamic national identity, published results of genetic research carried out in Iran from 1980-2010 show little to no corresponding change in experimental approaches or interpretations. Many Iranian geneticists still regularly refer to the Iranian population as “Aryan” and continue to base their scientific research on received popular notions that Iranians represent an “Aryan” ethnicity, suggesting the extent to which this sense of ethnic identity persists among Persian Iranians at a popular, if not necessarily state, level. I argue that the persistence of this trope within Iranian biology reflects not only enduring concepts of national identity within Iran, but also the participation of Iranian scientists within the global scientific community, wherein standardized practices of human population studies tend to reinforce national categories.