essay C Ben Mitchell charts the history of eugenics to the modern day
Eugenics? A
The return of
Two children with achondroplasia, a genetic condition that causes a form of dwarfism, in which growth of the long bones is restricted during development.
KEY POINTS
he eugenics movement had its origins in the early 19th century under the leadership of Galton in England and Davenport in the US, both of whom encouraged breeding of ‘desirables’ and reproductive controls for ‘undesirables’. In the US this led to ‘fitter families’ contests and mandatory eugenic sterilisations. Hitler simply took these ideas further. Now we are seeing the rise of a new eugenics movement armed with genetic
T
technology and using the tools of prenatal selection and abortion, harvesting of egg and sperm from desirable donors and genetic enhancement. It is likely that personal choice, consumerism and legal constraints on reproduction, rather than sterilisation, will fuel eugenics in the future.
8 TRIPLE HELIX SPRING 05
uthor of the Father Brown mysteries and political essayist, GK Chesterton perceptively said, ‘We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future,
if we are wrong about the past’. The American eugenics movement is an historical epoch that we can ill afford to be wrong about. Our future may depend upon our right interpretation of its past.
The old eugenics Eugenics is a compound of two Greek words meaning good and genes. The eugenics movement began at the turn of the last century in England and the United States. Under the leadership of social engineers Galton and Davenport, it became a remarkably powerful social force. Francis Galton (1822-1911), a cousin of Charles Darwin, was described as ‘a clever and compulsive counter’. 1
Obsessed with numerical patterns, he
studied mathematics at Cambridge. As the father of eugenics, Galton felt that social control was necessary to reduce the numbers of ‘unfit’. He argued that both Christianity, with its emphasis on the dignity of all human beings, and medical science, with its abilities to keep alive those who might otherwise have died of their physical, mental or moral defects, were holding back the progress of the human race. ‘If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of
Personal choice and consumerism are much more likely to fuel eugenics today
genius might we not create’. So Galton founded eugenics societies to encourage ‘desirables’ to reproduce and work to prevent ‘free propagation of the stock of those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism’. Over in the United States, biologist Charles Davenport (1866-1944) published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. 2
Under his directorship, The Eugenics
Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor served as headquarters for the American eugenics movement. Even president Theodore Roosevelt was enthusiastic: ‘I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilised and feeble-minded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them . . . the emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed’.3
Photo: Wellcome
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