How is it that the once obscure history of eugenics -- the pseudoscientific belief in the biological origins of social success and failure -- has become a hot topic for academics, reporters and investigative journalists? Any story that involves a combustible mix of reproduction, race and class is bound to spark attention, but there's more going on here than intellectual prurience.
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Breeding only the best
American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism Nancy Ordover, University of Minnesota Press: 240 pp., $18.95 paper War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Edwin Black, Four Walls Eight Windows: 550 pp., $27
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First, there's the specter of reparations looming over recent grass-roots efforts to wring public apologies from various state governments for their role in compelling patients and the "socially unfit" to undergo forced sterilization during the first half of the 20th century. "Our hearts are heavy for the pain caused by eugenics," noted Gov. Gray Davis in March, acknowledging that the victimization of some 20,000 people in state hospitals marked "a sad and regrettable chapter" in California's history. In the 1920s, the Golden State's leading civic reformers -- including Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Millikan and real estate tycoon Ezra S. Gosney -- lobbied nationwide for the eugenics agenda. And in the 1930s, as board members of Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation, they enjoyed a mutually appreciative relationship with the advocates of "race hygiene" in Nazi Germany.
Then there are the cautionary lessons the past offers about the unregulated use of genetic engineering and reproductive technology. Such contemporary issues as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, gene therapy and reproductive and research cloning promise the same kind of moral and political quagmires as sterilization, birth control and immigrant screening did in the United States between the world wars. Similarly, our current interest in the biological roots of cognitive ability echoes early 20th century debates about IQ tests.
Public concern today is directed not only at the reliability of research and the dangers posed by scientists going into the business of social engineering but also at how market forces drive the new genetics. As biotech companies take the initiative in research and development, who will get to decide, for example, whether prospective parents can customize their babies or whose identities should be maintained in DNA databanks?
