Proceeding With Great Caution

Robert Cooper *12, in responding to the PAW article about my new book, Designing Babies:  How Technology is Changing the Ways We Create Children, appreciates the complexities that the book raises, but criticizes the comment that “choosing socially desirable genes constitutes eugenics.”  He writes that “assisted reproductive technologies are in no way of a kind with the genocides and forced sterilizations of the eugenics movement. Eugenics was about taking away personal choice … the two are polar opposites.” 

But his letter suggests only a partial understanding of the eugenics movement, which in fact had many different forms. As the historian of science, Daniel Kevles, writes in In the Name of Eugenics:  Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, coined the term “eugenics” (from the Greek, “good in birth”) in 1883.  Galton used the phrase to describe efforts to give “more suitable races … a better chance of prevailing” over others.

In the early 20th Century, the eugenics movement spread in the U.S., as waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe arrived. In 1904, Charles Davenport established the Cold Spring Harbor Lab, collecting family pedigrees, and arguing that “feeblemindedness,” “pauperism” as well as various diseases were all hereditary. In his 1923 book, A Study of American Intelligence, Princeton professor Carl Brigham, a member of the Advisory Council of the American Eugenics Society, asserted that “Nordic races” were intellectually superior to others (though Brigham later recognized his errors, and helped develop the SAT test). In the 1920s, the American Eugenics Society began sponsoring dozens of Fitter Family Contests in Kansas and elsewhere, awarding trophies. Unfortunately, Hitler adapted his ideas about eugenics from the U.S., and took them to horrific ends.

As I expand on in the book itself, eugenics therefore took on various manifestations. Cooper’s statement that “eugenics was about taking away personal choice” refers to some, but hardly all of this movement’s unfortunate outputs. Eugenics also produced biased writings, disseminated misinformation, and promoted social inequalities, discrimination, racism, social stigma and other injustices.

I nowhere say that using new technologies for choosing traits seen as socially desirable — whether selecting male over female embryos, or genes associated with IQ, height, blond hair, blue eyes, certain kinds of athletic prowess, etc. — constitutes a Holocaust.  Rather, as we use these rapidly evolving technologies to alter our descendants’ genes for non-medical purposes, we should proceed with great caution, given the many past ways our society has, alas, viewed and pursued traits perceived as socially desirable.