EUGENICS: A CURSE FROM HISTORY
How did a niche scientific concept go mainstream and forge the way to the Holocaust in just a few decades? And could such an ideology take hold again?
The rise, fall and potential reawakening of eugenics – the idea that heredity can be used to improve society – is probed and debated by geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford.
The idea of shaping a population for its ‘betterment’ was championed by many of history’s greats in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Geneticist Francis Galton (right) and Ronald Fisher were among its scientific proponents, while Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt as well as Adolf Hitler were staunch political advocates. In Nazi Germany, the ideology was harnessed to murder millions of Jewish people, plus hundreds of thousands of people with physical disabilities or mental illnesses and gay people, among others.
But it was also used in America to sterilise some 70,000 people in the
20th Century. Enforced sterilisations for those deemed undesirable or ‘feebleminded’ – including those of low IQ – were considered by Winston Churchill when he was Home Secretary. This never became law, but instead the
UK’s Mental Deficiency Act was passed in 1913 (and stood until 1959) to isolate these people in institutions.
Rutherford presents a profoundly sensible take on the complexities of history and its giants – unafraid to question them while acknowledging their ‘formidable legacies’.
Even after the atrocities of the Second World War, eugenics never quite went away. The US carried on with forced sterilisations of women into this century – including reports in 2020 of women involuntarily sterilised at Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centres. China reportedly sterilised 10,000 women who had violated its former one-child rule, and millions were believed to be coercively sterilised in India under Indira Gandhi’s policies.
Could modern science and technology – having made enormous strides in reproductive science including IVF, embryo selection and genome editing – now be harnessed for population control in a way that resembles eugenics? Rutherford draws on his knowledge as a scientist to explore and explain the issues at stake and put them all into context.
This is an important book, though at times the horrors it unveils make it hard to read. But as Rutherford says:
‘To know this history is to inoculate ourselves against its being repeated.’