Science historian warns of neo-eugenics

In an era when the Human Genome Project is considered the "Holy Grail" of modern biology, a historian of science warns that society runs a risk of becoming too confident that science can solve most human problems.

One possible outcome could be a new form of eugenics emerging in our society, said Garland E. Allen, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts and Sciences, in a lecture delivered Saturday, Feb. 14, at a major national conference.

Eugenics was a social movement prevalent in Western culture from 1900 to 1940 that claimed many social, personality and mental traits were hereditary. This claim led to a belief that "bad heredity" in the poor, the working class and certain racial and ethnic groups was the cause of large-scale social problems.

Eugenicists sought to correct these problems by reducing the birth-rate among those deemed genetically defective and increasing it among those deemed genetically superior. The emphasis on better human breeding and racial purity became part of the stock-in-trade of the Nazi ideology that emerged so dramatically just before and during World War II.

Allen, delivering the George Sarton Lecture last weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), traced the history of eugenics and drew parallels between the early movement and current trends. The lecture was titled "Genetics, Eugenics and the Medicalization of Social Behavior: Lessons from the Past."

Eugenics led to concerns for the "burden of the poor," racial degeneracy and the call for increased "national efficiency" in Depression-era America and throughout Europe, especially in Germany, Allen explained. In arguing for increased national efficiency, eugenicists claimed that genetically "deficient" people drained the economies of industrious countries and were burdens best eliminated from the gene pool.

Among the ramifications of the eugenics movement, which was funded by some of America's wealthiest industrialists and philanthropists, were the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which restricted immigrants of "inferior biological stock" from central European and Mediterranean countries, and compulsory sterilization laws in 32 states that led to more than 60,000 sterilizations of both men and women between 1907 and the mid-1960s.

Allen said that simplistic genetic ideas were a classic trademark of eugenic thinking. For example, in the 1920s, eugenicists classified behavioral problems such as criminality, manic depressive insanity, schizophrenia, pauperism and even "thalassophilia" (love of the sea) as inherited traits.

Critics at the time pointed out that such claims lacked any substantial evidence and were being made irresponsibly. But eugenicists ignored criticism and pressed their points in the popular media and the political arena.

In viewing the present, Allen sees some similarities to the approach eugenicists took 75 years ago. He cited an array both of behaviors and of social problems ranging from depression, risk-taking and homosexuality to criminality and substance abuse that many psychiatrists and psychologists today consider to be predominantly genetically based. The evidence for such claims, Allen stated, is about as simplistic as eugenicist claims of the past and has little more solid data behind it.

Garland believes this view is coupled with a naive notion that the Human Genome Project, once completed, will reveal everything about human biology, and science will be better able to cope with such problems or behaviors. Thus he is concerned that the climate is ripe for a "repackaged" form of eugenics in American society, one that will attempt to use gene therapy or drugs to alter behavior, as eugenicists used sterilization to control social problems.

"Seventy-five years ago, eugenicists classified problems such as feeblemindedness, alcoholism, prostitution, unruliness and even thalassophilia as inherited traits," Allen said. "The trend today is to 'medicalize' behaviors such as criminality or alcoholism by lumping a whole array of behaviors into one category, giving them clinical names -- for instance, attention deficit hyperactive syndrome, ADHS -- making them sound like scientific judgments and then proposing medical or biological treatments.

"Biological explanations for social behaviors take the blame away from an individual's social circumstances -- from family, community and society at large -- and relocate it in the inherent makeup of the individual," he went on. "An understanding of the economic, social and political context in which the old eugenics movement developed provides some insights into the present 'movement' -- if we can call it that -- to medicalize and geneticize our social behavior."

According to Allen, the old eugenics arose out of turbulent economic and social conditions and three strands of thought in Western society early in the century:

• the Christian doctrine of original sin, which implies that we inherit the defects of our ancestors;

• individualism, which focuses on the individual as the basic unit of society and thus of social responsibility; and

• scientism, the belief that science can provide concrete and rational answers to human social and behavioral problems.

The Sarton Lecture was established in 1956 and is jointly sponsored by AAAS and the History of Science Society. It is considered the most prominent history of science lecture given annually. Sarton was influential in developing the history of science as an academic discipline and is credited with helping form Harvard's history of science department.