Eugenics returns

How do you like that title? Is your response to the mention of eugenics something like this? ‘When we have a clearer idea of our own ignorance we shall see that eugenics is more barbarous than cannibalism and far more destructive?’ (Germaine Greer in Sex and destiny, 1984). Or perhaps you echo this? ‘...the fearsome term eugenics - the deliberate manipulation of the gene pool with the idea of creating a master race...’ (New York Times Magazine, Christmas Eve, 1989). In either case, you are Politically Correct and, forgive my mentioning it, muddled.

‘Eugenic’ is the antonym of ‘dysgenic’, both technical adjectives which mean, respectively, good for or bad for the genome. Sir Francis Galton, who first used the noun ‘eugenics’ towards the end of the nineteenth century, defined it as: ‘...the scientific study of the biological and social factors which improve or impair the inborn qualities of human beings and of future generations’. What more laudable ambition could you ask of a biologist? Galton was convinced by his cousin Charles Darwin’s account of evolution in terms of natural selection. He had also realised that civilised societies such as his own, by enabling its more intelligent and far-sighted members to limit the numbers of their offspring, and at the same time motivating them to protect the weak and inadequate, had put a stop to, and would in time reverse, the selective processes that had led to high intelligence levels, and to civilised behaviour in the first place. Nevertheless, he saw that in those qualities our species still needed improvement. As he put it: ‘Man is gifted with pity and other kindly feelings; he has also the power of preventing many kinds of suffering. I conceive it to fall well within his province to replace Natural Selection by other processes that are more merciful and not less effective.’

Is it any wonder that thinking biologists all over the world embraced the benevolent concept of eugenics? To the giants of early and mid twentieth-century biology such as Julian Huxley, C H Waddington, Joseph Needham and J B S Haldane, and to many socially-concerned intellectuals of their day, including Dean Inge, William Beveridge and the growing Fabian Society, it gave social immediacy to biology. The Eugenics Society and its journal became their forum, because there was much to argue about, but even the criticisms of eugenics voiced by Lancelot Hogben, J B S Haldane and L S Penrose, concerned not the idea of eugenics, but its techniques and database.

Why did things go askew? Essentially, because Galton’s thinking came a century before its time: the basic science with which to approach the problem was not in place. He knew nothing of genes and Mendelism, and his only practical approach to eugenics amounted to empirical stock-breeding, with its attendant problems of deciding, in humans, what characteristics are inheritable and, among those, which are desirable and which are not. The first question was difficult enough, though he and later geneticists made progress with it; the second was impossible and remained so.

Substantial ignorance of genetics led to all sorts of cock-eyed proposals: some sensible, such as the voluntary sterilisation of those likely to produce congenitally defective offspring, others almost comic, such as Huxley’s proposal for a sperm-bank from Nobel Prize winners, for the voluntary insemination of suitable mothers. Yet others were simply horrifying, including the distortions of eugenic objectives which were implemented forcibly in Nazi Germany, and inter-war Southern USA.

In effect, political confusion, latter-day tribalism and semantic obfuscation filled the scientific vacuum and made eugenics into a dirty words. Gradually, and in some bewilderment, the eugenics movement became silent and its name was all but abandoned.

However, the problem posed by Galton has not gone away, and the ignorance that bedevilled earlier thinking is fast disappearing. Today we can identify some of the genes which, mutated, are responsible for cystic fibrosis, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, adenosine deaminese deficiency and several other hereditary disorders. More will be discovered. Already we are beginning to be able to moderate some of these diseases, in individuals, by somatic introduction of unmutated genes. Fairly soon we should be able to introduce undamaged genes into the germ cells of afflicted patients, and so correct such disorders for generations to come. Is there any ethical, social or moral reason why we should not do just that? It would be the beginning of eugenics as Galton conceived it: using our understanding of heredity to improve the human gene pool as a whole.

Can that taint of a dreaded word explain why the prospect of germ-line therapy has generated a resounding squawk of ethical alarm? For example, ‘It is foolish and ethically unacceptable to use germ-line therapy to make changes in people’s DNA that can be inherited, and it should be outlawed’. (Chairwoman of the Group of Advisers on Ethical Implications of Biotechnology of the European Commission, quoted in New Scientist, December 24/31, 1994. p.11.)

Foolish? Ethically unacceptable? Strong words; I sense politically correct bigotry, for the written text of the Group’s ‘4th Opinion’ is less dogmatic, if more evasive. Of course, any therapy is foolish, as well as ethically unacceptable, if it is prematurely offered, and any therapy that goes wrong raises acute moral, not to mention financial, problems. Germ-line therapy is far from practicable yet, but it is well on its way. It would be ‘foolish and ethically unacceptable’ to try to stop it, such is its potential for ameliorating the human condition.

We cannot uninvent germ-line therapy. When it comes, society will have to face the deeper problem which Galton saw so clearly. In time we shall learn the genetic bases, such as they may be, of social inadequacy, criminality, and other behavioural aberrations - even, perhaps, of aspects of intelligence and creativity. What we must debate now is not how to cop out, but how to get it right and use this knowledge wisely.