|
|
MedicoLegal
Consultants |
|
|
Book Review Winter 2004
This will be the century of human genetics, right? When the human genome analysis and cloning and gene transfer technology will finally produce a healthier, more beautiful, generally better human race. No more racial or mental defectives. But people have been thinking about such things for a long, long time: certainly the plant and animal breeders who knew how to produce a superior species by conserving certain traits and eliminating those deemed undesirable. Ever since Charles Darwin watched the finches fly around the Galapagos Islands from the good ship Beagle and certainly since Gregor Mendel's calculations of wrinkled and smooth or tall and short pea plants were rediscovered in the early part of the 20th century, people have been actively pursuing the "betterment" of humanity by scientific methodology. Sure they called it eugenics and it has been largely discredited as a science, but, hey it was mostly genetics, wasn't it? Edwin Black, the chronicler of IBM's unseemly role in facilitating the holocaust via their computer technology of another era, has now told the disturbing story of the eugenics movement, born in the USA, spread to Europe and elsewhere around the world, and of course reaching its ultimate success (so far) in Nazi Germany. Perhaps the most shocking part of the story is not the racial theories of Hitler and his band of criminals but the supportive role played by those icons of American philanthropy: the Harriman Trust, the Carnegie Foundation, and the Rockefeller funds. These entities supported much bogus research and data collection, not only here in the United States, but abroad as well. Mr. Black's documentation is extensive and detailed. It makes one shake his head and wonder: what were they thinking? Then there is the role of the famous Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, now famous for its activities in mainstream genetics research and for its director, James Watson, Nobel laureate as the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. But this laboratory, which dates back nearly to the turn of the 20th century, was for many years a hotbed of the eugenics movement, largely supported by the Carnegie Foundation and other elitist social engineers. Nowadays we might call their activities supportive of "ethnic cleansing" or even genocide, but those are latter day terms. The term eugenics and its modern inception can be traced back to Francis J. Galton, the Englishman responsible for inventing fingerprint technology as a means of identification and almost as famous for using statistical methods to trace weather patterns, contributing greatly to meteorology However, the true father of the eugenics movement was the American Charles Davenport, Harvard-trained zoologist and for many years the director of the Carnegie Institution-sponsored Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. He and his hand-picked assistant, Harry H. Laughlin of Missouri, set the tone for the movement's philosophy and methods from the laboratory's inception in 1904. Both men could trace their ancestries back several centuries to well-known Americans and Englishmen. Davenport's recruitment of Mary Harriman, the widow of the railroad baron and possessor of one of the great fortunes at the turn of the century, into supporting the movement was perhaps his great practical achievement. Developing close ties with the American Breeder's Association also advanced the cause. This is an important book, meticulously researched with an enormous number of original documents and precise research from numerous foreign and domestic sources. Its conclusions have gained the attention of the historical and scientific communities and the public at large. But why include it in a medicolegal website? Because many of the techniques employed by the eugenicists were medical (sterilization, birth control, abortion) and enabled by legal means: mostly lobbying and bribing state legislators to pass laws allowing such procedures. One of the most compelling historical pieces related in the book is that of Carrie Buck, whose involuntary sterilization in Virginia in 1927 was sustained and made famous by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. opinion concluding: "three generations of imbeciles are enough." Whether she indeed was an imbecile (or were her progenitors for that matter) remains debatable to this day. But Virginia was not the only state with sterilization laws. More so-called mental defectives and social misfits were sterilized in California than all other states. The manner in which the ERO (Eugenics Research Organization), the old American Breeders Association was able to infiltrate and later change Margaret Sanger's birth control movement, originally aimed mostly as an aid to poor women to control their high birth rate, for their own objectives is a classic story of subversion from within. Mr. Black details the complex relationship between the famous birth control reformer and the eugenicists who wished to extend Sanger's methodology to their war against the social defectives and the racially undesirable. The ultimate form of eugenics, that of genocide, is a chilling coda to its historical antecedents in America and its "final solution" against the Jews in Nazi Germany. Although there was little precedent for wholesale racial extermination in the United States, certainly lynching and other vigilante or quasi-legal executions were common, especially in the South where racial segregation was made de jure via the Jim Crow laws in the late 19th century. Miscegenation was a crime in a majority of the southern states. Of course this did not prevent sexual relations between the races. Yet we are still shocked by the very recent revelation by Strom Thurmond's mixed-race daughter that one of the most famous segregationists of the 20th century and the longest serving senator in U.S. history, one who actually ran for President on a segregationist platform in 1948, was her father.
Perhaps the greatest
value of this remarkable book lies in its cautionary capacity for
modern times. Its disturbing story of the subversion of science to
serve racial and political motives serves as a warning for those who
would utilize the latest discoveries and techniques in reproductive
and genetic science for similar objectives. |
