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September 24, 2021
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Stephan Jakubowski
A Cautionary History
of
Eugenics
by Stephan Jakubowski
* * * *
A century ago this week, 300 scientists, policy-makers, and campaigners gathered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York to discuss their work about heredity and eugenics — the political ideology designed to sculpt societies through biological methods of population control (the meeting was highlighted in Science a week later).
The aims of eugenics were to nurture the propagation of people deemed “desirable” and to reduce the number of “undesirable” or “defective” people, primarily through enforced sterilization.
Although recognized as toxic now, back then, eugenics enjoyed popular and bipartisan support and would grow to be one of the defining ideas of the 20th century.
The meeting had been coordinated by the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, founded by the prominent eugenicist Charles Davenport, and by the office’s director, the equally zealous Harry Laughlin.
Laughlin was the author of a “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law” to standardize state legislation to prevent people with “undesirable” characteristics from having babies.
It would eventually be translated and adopted by the Third Reich.
The conference treasurer was Madison Grant, best known for his popular book The Passing of the Great Race — a treatise on white supremacy that was pivotal in developing the policies of racial hygiene in Nazi Germany.
These zealots and other scientists carved out specious ideas of human population control, which would lead to the coerced sterilization of some 70,000 in the United States and to genocide in Nazi Germany.
It is sobering to look back from today’s perspective and see how
mainstream such jarring ideas were only a century ago, and how integrated
they were with the nascent science of human genetics.
Eugenics policies emerged from racist, classist, and ableist beliefs and co-opted vague, nebulous definitions and pseudo-clinical categories — feebleminded, defective, imbecile.
From its inception, eugenics was a political creed, but one that was wedded to a science that was immature and frequently wrong.
Ultimately, in the US, forced sterilization primarily targeted the poor and those with disabilities and was deployed against African Americans, Indigenous Americans, and other marginalized groups.
These policies lasted late into the 20th century, but coercive sterilization still occurs in the US today.
Globally, this practice continues as a strategy for oppression and population control.
After the atrocities of the Holocaust were exposed, popular support for eugenics waned, and it became a poisonous idea.
Many eugenics offices around the world were shut or evolved into genetics research laboratories.
The majority of scientists abandoned this now reviled ideology and applied their growing knowledge of heredity to better ends — techniques such as preimplantation diagnosis, which identifies possible genetic defects in embryos created through in vitro fertilization.
Our understanding of polygenic traits and diseases has skyrocketed in the past few years, revealing the complex relationship between nature and nurture — a phrase coined by Francis Galton, the man who also invented the term “eugenics.”
As science makes advances in reproductive biology, it is incumbent upon
scientists and society to firmly grasp this cautionary history and to
understand how a political idea transmogrified into policy for many
countries.
With modern genetic techniques, including precision gene editing, we are inventing unprecedented possibilities for control of human biology, and society should proceed with a clear understanding not just of the limitations of this science, but of its grim history.
Today, we hear frequent discussions about ideas such as embryo selection — not just to reduce disease risk but to enhance traits — and indeed, companies are emerging in the US with this as a potential service offered by their future businesses.
Before embracing such technologies, it’s critical to remember that these techniques are both scientifically dubious and share an ancestry with the racist history of eugenics.
Scientific ideas are easily marshalled into political ideologies, regardless of whether the science is well understood or not.
Cultures change, and today, we strive to change the culture of science to be more inclusive and to center the voices of those who only a century ago were the targets of an ideology that enlisted an immature science into its arsenal.
J. B.S. Haldane, a titan of 20th-century biology, wrote in 1938 — in response to the eugenic policies of the US and Nazi Germany — words that nearly 85 years later, are still true: “…I do not believe that our present knowledge of human heredity justifies such steps.”
Adam Rutherford a.rutherford@ucl.ac.uk
Adam Rutherford is a Research Fellow at University College London, London, UK.
Science, Volume 373 • Issue 6562
24 September 2021, Pages: 1419