"No group of experts should be more aware of the hazards of unwarranted claims than geneticists. After all, it was the exuberance of geneticists early in this century that led to the creation of a discipline called eugenics. These scientists were every bit as clever, competent, and well-meaning as today's genetic engineers." - David Suzuki, a professor of genetics (from item 1)
"Hitler praised eugenics, but eugenics was not a crazed Hitlerian fantasy. It was established science in the Western world and it didn't go away after Hitler demonstrated the danger of using it as social policy. Eugenics wasn't even pseudoscience. Science is what scientists agree it is..." (item 2)
1.HUMAN GENETICS: troubled past/present danger - GM WATCH
2.The Seduction of Science - Washington Post
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1.HUMAN GENETICS: troubled past/present danger
http://www.gmwatch.org/p2temp2.asp?aid=52&page=1&op=1
Human genetics is a science with a troubled past.
"No group of experts should be more aware of the hazards of unwarranted claims than geneticists," according to David Suzuki, a professor of genetics. "After all, it was the exuberance of geneticists early in this century that led to the creation of a discipline called eugenics. These scientists were every bit as clever, competent, and well-meaning as today's genetic engineers."
Suzuki goes on to point out that it was the enthusiastic claims of the early geneticists on improving health and intelligence through encouraging the survival of "good genes" (eu-genics means literally 'good genes') which:
"...provided scientific respectability to the US prohibiting interracial marriage and immigration from countries judged inferior, and allowed sterilization of inmates of mental institutions on genetic grounds. In Nazi Germany, geneticist Josef Mengele held peer-reviewed research grants for his work at Auschwitz. The grand claims of geneticists led to 'race purification' laws and the Holocaust." [from "Experimenting with Life" http://www.biotech-info.net/experimenting.html]
The fashion for eugenics had an international impact and its effects still reverberate around the world today. Only recently, for example, came reports of 15,000 forced sterilisations in France. Another recent article reports on an experiment in which thousands of South American Indians were deliberately infected with measles by a US scientific team of genetic researchers, killing hundreds This scientific atrocity has taken a decade to uncover. http://www.wwnorton.com/catalog/spring00/04922.htm
The UK has also been far from free of such influences, as anyone can see by checking out the membership of the British Eugenics Society and seeing just some of the formal badge wearers among the many scientists and others influenced by this fashion. Among the list of the Society's many eminent members is to be found RM Acheson, former Prof. of Community Medicine at Cambridge University and a member of the General Medical Council's Executive Committee. Prof Acheson is also the brother of the UK's former Chief Medical Officer, Sir Donald Acheson. http://www.africa2000.com/ENDX/endx.htm
For the originators of eugenics, the actual means of encouraging the survival of 'good genes' and of discouraging the survival of 'bad genes' were fairly crude, eg sterilisation. Today the options, particularly in the light of the growing number of genetic tests, are greater. It is in this context that we should see comments like that of Bob Edwards, the world-renowned embryologist and IVF pioneer, who is on record as saying, "Soon it will be a sin for parents to have a child that carries the heavy burden of genetic disease." (Sunday Times, 4 July 1999)
Today's fashionable leading-edge in genetics centres on biotechnology which has given us the ability to tamper with the very blueprint of life.
And if this raises profound dangers, then this time the risks of scientific fashion are also compounded by massive commercial interests as well a continuing background of eugenic thought.
For the rest of this introductory article covering:
Mining the genome
Patents on life
Gene therapy: at the crossroads
Designer babies
Scientists and scholars supporting 'germline' GE
Scientists and scholars supporting human cloning
http://www.gmwatch.org/p2temp2.asp?aid=52&page=1&op=1
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2.The Seduction of Science To Perfect an Imperfect Race
By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 22, 2004; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32933-2004Apr21.html
Josef Mengele, the death camp doctor whose name is synonymous with Nazi sadism, makes only a brief appearance in the new Holocaust Memorial Museum exhibition "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." He is there, almost as a footnote, surrounded by his ilk, and more to the point, by the trappings, the prestige and the dignity of science. Mengele, as a criminal, is a symbol for a larger travesty, and it is that larger crime, the use and abuse of science in the name of Nazism, that the new exhibition examines.
"Deadly Medicine," which opens today and runs through October 2005, is so cogent and chilling it's worth seeing twice. Go through the first time the way curator Susan Bachrach intended, beginning with the fears and anxieties of Germany just after its devastating loss in the first World War. Defeat, poverty and the rise of urbanization made Germans fear their culture was losing its identity and its resilience. But rising to the challenge of saving Germany was a nexus of doctors, reformers and scientists who promised relief. Mankind, looked at objectively, could make itself healthier: by having healthier babies, tracing and eliminating genetic defects and preventing disease and "deviancy" -- alcoholism, prostitution and other "urban" ills -- from spreading throughout the society and from one generation to the next. All of these efforts, including a sinister strain of racism (let's keep the German bloodline pure and healthy), were grouped under the loose field of "eugenics."
From an exploration of the rise of eugenics, the exhibit leads inexorably, methodically and incrementally to the Nazi era of forced sterilization, euthanasia and, finally, concentration camps, mass killings and the ovens of Auschwitz. Illustrating a complex interweaving of ideas are exhibits that show the wide appeal, to both the political left and the right, of eugenic thinking (which dated back to the 19th century). Calipers for measuring the body, trays of glass eyes for determining eye color and anthropological mug shots show the scientific fascination with documenting the spectrum of human variation. Posters show a concern with women's reproductive health; there's also propaganda material encouraging young couples to make genetically advantageous marriages. Documenting the other end of this long and tragic evolution of thought is an asbestos mitt, used by the people who stoked the crematoriums where the bodies of the disabled were incinerated.
At every step in this tragic progress a moral threshold is crossed. Why it was crossed, then and there, in Hitler's Germany, is open to endless debate. But as the museum's director, Sara J. Bloomfield, says in the catalogue to the exhibition, "During the Holocaust, every institution established to uphold civilized values failed -- the academy, the media, the judiciary, law enforcement, the churches, the government and, yes, the medical and scientific disciplines as well."
So much for the virtues of civil society, and so much for the hallowed purity of science.
Now go through the exhibition a second time, starting with the most distinctive failure of German society, the death camps, and strip away each of the peculiarly German "twists" that happened to science and medicine in the years leading up to Hitler's regime. Suddenly, this is an exhibition about problems that are universal to science and medicine, about the arrogance of the Enlightenment and the willingness of thinkers to collaborate with ideologues, all of which is deeply troubling.
"We've shown this to a lot of physicians, and they respond very uniquely to it," Bachrach says. "Some of them get very defensive about it."
Doctors can watch exemplars of their field, famous pediatricians, become instrumental in euthanizing children with birth defects. Anthropologists and other scientists will see how easy it was to cross the very fine line between gathering data on people from other cultures and using that data to divide people into racial classes, hierarchically arranged. One of the way stations en route to killing 6 million Jews was figuring out just what a Jew was, and science was more than happy to assist in making the distinction.
Visitors who may like to think that Germany was particularly exceptional in its pursuit of eugenics will find no comfort either. Early in the exhibit, there is space devoted to eugenics in other countries. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s Supreme Court decision of 1927, which affirmed Virginia's right to sterilize Carrie Buck, a supposedly "feebleminded" woman, is plastered on the wall. The message is as repellent as the language is seductive: "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." And referring to Buck's mother, who was also considered feebleminded, and her daughter, who it was assumed must be feebleminded, he concluded in words that have become infamous: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
This was not one of those occasional hiccups of nastiness the court gives us from time to time. America, in fact, was a leader in the eugenics movement.
"By 1933, by the time the Nazi sterilization law gets passed," says Paul Lombardo, professor of bioethics and law at the University of Virginia, "there are about 20 states in America that already have sterilization laws. Hitler praises American eugenicist policies in 'Mein Kampf.' "
Hitler praised eugenics, but eugenics was not a crazed Hitlerian fantasy. It was established science in the Western world and it didn't go away after Hitler demonstrated the danger of using it as social policy. Eugenics wasn't even pseudoscience. Science is what scientists agree it is, and although there were scientific critics of eugenics (which was based on a developing and often flawed understanding of genetics), eugenicists were not outside the scientific mainstream.
"Eugenics really didn't get discredited that quickly," Lombardo says. "The word eugenics didn't become a dirty word in America until the late 1960s, early 1970s. Nobody was embarrassed to call themselves a eugenicist in 1955."
Nor did the doctors and scientists who worked so intimately with Hitler's government necessarily find themselves discredited by the Holocaust. Here's Eugen Fischer, a leader of the German eugenics movement, in an article published in Nazi Germany in 1943: "It is a rare and special good fortune for a theoretical science to flourish at a time when the prevailing ideology welcomes it, and its findings can immediately serve the policy of the state." And here's Fischer, by now an eminence of German science, backpedaling furiously in 1955: "It is certainly not the fault of eugenics, if godless and criminal misuse occurred in National Socialism without any knowledge of the genetic facts, and through the destruction of all human dignity."