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GMW:_The_seduction_of_science

" GM_WATCH "

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 14:59:56 +0100

 

GM WATCH daily

http://www.gmwatch.org

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" " 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. "

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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