April 13, 2016
THANK GOD FOR THE WAR ON SCIENCE:
"People have to start thinking out eugenics in a different way" : Why is a high profile, massively funded, European 'superlab' named after Francis Crick? (Philippa Taylor, Apr 7 2016, MercatorNet)In a time when we have public arguments about the removal of statues and plaques that commemorate people who are now regarded as racist, why has a high profile, massively funded, European "superlab" been given the name of a British scientist who was an unashamed eugenicist?
Crick's personal letters showed his belief in eugenics, even suggesting that the Nazis had simply given eugenics "a bad name", adding that: "I think it is time something is done to make it respectable again" (letter to biochemist Dr John T Edsall on June 10, 1971).
Crick famously threatened to leave a scientific group after researchers protested against a racist research proposal that posited finding evidence for supposed differences in the IQ of black and white people. Crick actually agreed there were racial IQ differences and suggested these were as a result of genetics.
He wrote in another letter to Edsall and six other members of the American National Academy of Sciences in February 1971 that:
"...In brief I think it likely that more than half the difference between the average IQ of American whites and Negroes is due to genetic reasons, and will not be eliminated by any foreseeable change in the environment. Moreover I think the social consequences of this are likely to be rather serious unless steps are taken to recognize the situation..."
This was years after he aired his views to Lord Snow. When Lord Snow asked him about a BBC programme, Crick wrote on April 17 1969:
"As far as I remember I said that the biological evidence was that all men were not created equal, and it would not only be difficult to try to do this, but biologically undesirable. As an a[s]ide I said that the evidence for the equality of different races did not really exist. In fact, what little evidence there was suggested racial differences." (emphasis in original).
Crick even went so far as to advocate bribery and sterilisation of certain groups of people!
His 1970 letter to Dr B. Davis at Harvard Medical School to offer financial incentives to families to separate twins at birth for research said that people who were "poorly genetically endowed" should be sterilised:
"...My other suggestion is in an attempt to solve the problem of irresponsible people and especially those who are poorly endowed genetically having large numbers of unnecessary children. Because of their irresponsibility, it seems to me that for them, sterilization is the only answer and I would do this by bribery. It would probably pay society to offer such individuals something like £l,000 down and a pension of £5 a week over the age of 60. As you probably know, the bribe in India is a transistor radio and apparently there are plenty of takers."
Is this relevant now?
"Eugenics" is a compound of two Greek words meaning good and genes. Eugenics is usually viewed as a historical phenomenon, involving coercive, state sponsored, reproductive control.
What appals true eugenicists is that the whole business of human reproduction is out of rational control and is left to chance. After saying the Nazis had given it a bad name, Crick said in one letter that: "people have to start thinking out eugenics in a different way." In that respect, he was right. Eugenics is now thought out differently.
Armed with new genetic technologies, a new eugenic enthusiasm has emerged. The new eugenics is more laissez-faire, but is one where it is irresponsible to refuse to undergo prenatal tests, where every child has the "right" to a healthy genetic endowment and where we improve humans by deliberately picking and choosing their inherited traits.
This brings us back to the Francis Crick Institute.
The HFEA's controversial decision to grant approval to the Francis Crick Institute to conduct germline editing on human embryos using the technique Crispr-Cas 9 has been covered by us here.
However some bioethics experts and groups have warned that germline research now being carried out at the Crick Institute could be used for eugenic purposes. Under a headline: "Eugenics is inevitable because parents will always want to 'enhance' their children", a group of 150 British scientists said:
"Permitting germline intervention for any intended purpose would open the door to an era of high-tech consumer eugenics in which affluent parents seek to choose socially preferred qualities for their children ... We must not engineer the genes we pass on to our descendants."
Even Professor Lovell Badge, a supporter of germline research, recently warned in The Telegraph:
"...You can quite easily imagine that if one (a rogue clinic) were to apply these techniques to germline editing the place where it's going to happen is going to be associated in some way with IVF clinics...You can quite easily imagine the combination of the ego of the person running the thing and someone who wants treatment and is saying 'I will slip you $50,000' (£35,867) or whatever to do this. And that scares me."
In highlighting this, we are not advocating removal of either the Rhodes statue nor the Institute, but we want to challenge this high profile celebration of a eugenicist, and to warn that current research carried out in the same place may end up with exactly the same highly objectionable (indeed, harmful) purposes that Francis Crick had.
Progressives and Eugenics: The Case of Justice Brandeis : Understanding the progressive movement's ugly record. (Damon Root|Apr. 12, 2016, Reason)
Perhaps the most glaring example of this phenomenon is eugenics, a notorious branch of pseudo-science that was championed by most leading progressive politicians and activists and ultimately given the stamp of legal approval by progressive judicial hero Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Writing for the majority in the 1927 Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell, Justice Holmes upheld the state of Virginia's efforts to forcibly sterilize a young woman who had been raped and impregnated by the nephew of her foster mother and sent to a home for the "socially inadequate" by her foster parents. "We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives," Holmes wrote (likely alluding to his own military service in the Civil War). "It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices." The forced sterilization of Carrie Buck went forward.
Credit: Library of CongressCredit: Library of CongressWriting recently in The New York Times, David Oshinsky reviews Leonard's Illiberal Reformers and confronts the ugly legacy of the progressive movement. In one notable passage from that review, Oshinsky puzzles over the fact that Justice Louis Brandeis, a progressive luminary best remembered today for his legal advocacy on behalf of privacy and "the right to be let alone," also signed on to Holmes' notorious pro-eugenics decision.
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 13, 2016 4:29 AM