the new eugenics is the same as the old, just in more chic clothes

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the Boyer CBA conferences. Presented by Professor John Rasko, the 2018 Life Engineered Conferences explore ethical and other issues related to gene therapy and related technologies, as well as their potential for curing diseases, prolonging life and changing the course of life. human evolution.

The first lecture will be broadcast on the big ideas of the RN at 8 pm tonight. In this article, we explore the history of eugenics and the ethical implications of its resurgence with the evolution of gene therapy.

The news about the potential of genetic engineering to improve our lives is often compromised by problematic stories about its potential for misuse. Should couples be allowed to choose the sex of their offspring? Should the state intervene in the reproductive life of its citizens?

We see it recently in the case of couples traveling to clinics abroad to use IVF and choose the sex of their child – a prohibited practice in Australia. These case studies represent only the latest in a long history of the debate about the "improvement" of humanity – the science of eugenics.

Some scientists and ethicists think that eugenics is a worthless science that has a bad reputation because of the practices in force in Nazi Germany.

The philosopher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu, for example, endorsed the "new eugenics," claiming that, during his previous incarnation, he had been tainted by bad science and state intervention. He argued that we have a moral obligation to overcome certain limitations if science permits, including ensuring that babies are not born with certain types of disabilities.

It follows that the new science is a "good" science and that the free market will lead to human improvement and not to a violation of fundamental rights.

Read more:
Toby Young: What is progressive eugenics and what does it have to do with meritocracy?

Eugenics is not a Nazi creation

Discussing Nazi eugenics, however, misses the point. This is because German eugenicists learned the trade by observing the extensive sterilization programs conducted in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, which prevented tens of thousands of people from reproducing.

Legal control completely failed. The sterilization program that targeted "lower" Americans was approved by the Supreme Court in the Buck v. Canada case. Bell in 1927. Carrie Buck was surgically sterilized at the age of 22 with the help of fabricated evidence of the mental incapacity of her mother and seven-month-old daughter. . The reason given in the judgment of principle was that "three generations of idiots suffice".

The Rockefeller Foundation funded the work of Josef Mengele (a doctor who later performed human experiments on prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp) before the Second World War, on genetics and disease. With the Carnegie Foundation and the Harriman family, millions of dollars have been invested in research programs used to justify the sterilization of people with disabilities in the United States.

Great scientists and eugenics

Not that we can only point the finger at the United States Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, founded the modern eugenics movement in Britain. He initiated the movement for the Eugenics Society to begin in the early 1900s. He supported policies that reduced the reproductive rights of "lower" members of society – from birth control clinics in slum areas of big cities to severe immigration, including state-imposed sterilization.

Karl Pearson, the first Galton Chairholder of Eugenics at University College London, has discovered many of the most important principles underlying modern statistics. His work on establishing methods of measuring biological normality to create "better" humans has been at the heart of his statistics.

Many biologists and Nobel Prize winners in biology were members of society – the brightest minds of generations, leading opinion leaders of the time. Among these were Ronald Fisher, founder of Modern Biology of Evolution (who claimed that the poorest classes were genetically inferior to the middle classes), Nobel laureate immunologist Peter Medawar, and the pioneer of IVF, Robert Edwards.

Read more:
Boyer Conferences: Gene therapy is still in its infancy but the future promises promising

Prominent scientists have always preached the eugenic message of the biological inequality of human beings after 1945, as well as the need to restrict the reproductive rights of these people. For example, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, virologist McFarlane Burnett, Nobel laureate of Australia, pointed out the danger of allowing less intelligent members of society to live in larger families in a Eugenics Society magazine article, Eugenics Review.

Even more controversial, James Watson, who with Francis Crick and with a very late recognition Rosalind Franklin, discovered the chromosome's double-helix architecture in 1953, recently claimed that blacks are less genetically intelligent than whites and that women are less intelligent. able in the sciences.

Read more:
Eugenics in Australia: the secret of Melbourne's elite

But we are "better" now

Maybe science is "better" now, as Savalescu claims – but it also raises concerns.

Perhaps the most important consideration when evaluating the benefits of the new eugenics is the thorny question of what makes a human "better".

Admittedly, if we take deafness, there is a large deaf movement that considers deafness a culture and not a handicap. Advocates of this view argue that deaf people do not fail in a way that makes them inferior, they are just different, and society must take this difference into account and not "heal" it, much as it does. Homosexuality has been demedicalized.

Can the same be said of other so-called handicaps? Is having a higher IQ "better"?

The founder of social Darwinism, Herbert Spencer, coined the term "survival of the fittest". The interrogation of this statement actually shows that it is a tautology.

Question: Who survives?

Answer: the most fit

Question: Who are the best?

Answer: those who survive.

A tautology is a meaningless formula for future action because it only describes what has happened in the past. We know who "survived" is the story written by the "winners". For Spencer, the white men of the middle class were the most fit. Have we simply replaced "more fit" with "better"?

We need to think clearly about the consequences of new genetic technologies and not blindly adopt them in the name of "improvement" if we do not scrupulously ask why these "improvements" are needed. This was a problem with most definitions of the unfit term by eugenicists in the past.

If significant funds are to be allocated to modern eugenics, policy-makers must be involved in finding solutions to these problems, otherwise the "new eugenics" is simply the old one.