GENETIC SELECTION > INFORMATION > SHEET 9

ISSUES AND CONCERNS

After the recent discovery of the gene for achondroplasia, which causes dwarfism, Tom Shakespeare, a 4ft 5in sociology lecturer, wrote an essay in which he drew parallels with the eugenics attempted in Nazi Germany.

	Tom Shakespeare

“The implications of much genetic research is that people like me should not have been born. There is a whole range of factors contributing to quality of life and biological attributes are only a small part of them.”

Tom Shakespeare

Some people associate developments in modern human genetics with the abuse of eugenics that occurred in Nazi Germany. Those people fear that a growing number of fetuses may be terminated as a potential result of genetic testing and screening if they have genetic defects. They argue that there could be a real danger that people who have made exemplary contributions - from the scientist Stephen Hawking (motor neurone disease) to the singer Woody Guthrie (Huntington’s disease) - might never have been born if the new genetic knowledge and technology had arrived a few decades earlier.

While such anxieties are probably unjustified, there is a need for wider public debate and education to put current developments into perspective and to ensure that abuses do not occur in the future. In order to do this it may be useful to explore the lessons of history and in particular how the underlying values and attitudes of the political eugenics movement led to the abuse of Galton’s theories.

BRIEF HISTORY OF EUGENICS

When looking at the history of eugenics it is essential to:

• make a distinction between the science of eugenics and the political eugenics movement;
• clarify that the political ‘eugenics’ movement was using scientific explanation to rationalize the implementation of policies that were, more often than not, based on ignorance and prejudice. In the late nineteenth century Francis Galton, a mathematician and younger cousin of Charles Darwin, suggested that human beings might be “improved” in the same way as varieties of plants or farm animals. He coined the word “eugenics” to describe this process.

“It’s important to understand that Galton’s concept was, in itself, relatively harmless. In the main it involved offering people the choice of using information, as they do today, to ensure ‘healthy’ or ‘optimal’ offspring. Galton himself
assumed people would use the knowledge for this purpose. The term, however, was hijacked by ignorant politicians who used it as a cover for coercive purposes, both in America and in Germany.”
Professor Bernadette Modell

Galton’s ideas quickly became popular and eugenic research establishments were set up throughout the world. The first eugenic researchers were encouraged by the newly-rediscovered work of Mendel. Mendel’s initial work focused on characteristics in plants that were controlled by single genes. Eugenic researchers tried to explain human characteristics, including temperament and intelligence, in terms of the inheritance of single genes.

From their statistical studies of families, researchers claimed to have identified genes governing behaviours such as ‘holding a grudge’ and ‘pauperism’. One prominent American eugenicist even searched for a gene for ‘love of the sea’ (this, he believed, would be common among naval officers!). In the first decade of this century, surgical procedures permitting human sterilization were perfected. Before the advent of antibiotics, a significant proportion of operations led to further complications and even death, but the new surgical techniques were welcomed by the political eugenic movement.

Despite the enthusiasm of some people, proposals for sterilization were fiercely rejected in Britain, The Netherlands and several central European countries. Marie Stopes, a member of the Eugenics Society in the United Kingdom, advocated family planning through contraception instead.

However, throughout northern Europe, particularly in Scandinavia, sterilization was widely practised. During the 1920s and 1930s many prominent people of widely-differing political persuasions advocated compulsory sterilization of certain groups. Towards the end of his life the socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote (with deliberate irony, one assumes)

“If we desire a certain type of civilization, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it… Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly”.

In Britain the political eugenics movement ended up with the great socialist JBS Haldane, who proposed separating the matter of reproduction from the act of love by conceiving and growing children outside the body. He called it ectogenesis. Aldous Huxley satirized the idea in Brave New World. The worst extremes of the political eugenics movement occurred in Nazi Germany. Funds were poured into eugenic research institutes by the Nazis in an effort to find scientific backing for their racist policies. Influenced by the American model, the Nazis passed their own ‘racial hygiene’ law in 1933.

“Whoever is not bodily and spiritually healthy and worthy shall not have the right to pass on his suffering in the body of his children.”

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

In the early 1940s about two million young Germans were forcibly sterilized - most of them were between 15 and 17 years old. Compulsory sterilization was only the first step, it was soon to be supplemented by systematic mass murder of the mentally and physically disabled and eventually, by the horrors of the death camps.

By 1945, six million had died in Auschwitz and other camps. During the 1940s, scientific opinion started to turn against the eugenics movement. The Nazi atrocities had much to do with this. In addition, evidence from conventional plant and animal genetics was beginning to reveal the complex nature of inheritance.

The eugenic researchers had neglected polygenic characteristics - those characteristics, such as height, which are controlled by the interaction of many genes. Political Eugenicists, influenced by notions of class and race, also failed to take adequate consideration of cultural, economic and other influences on human development. Because of the lessons of history, today, scientists, involved with the Human Genome Project are anxious to ensure that the gift of the new knowledge is used to benefit rather than harm people; they have allocated a significant proportion of the funds for the Human Genome Project to explore the ethical, legal and social implications of the research.