Eugenics

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a belief in biological determinism became the basis for the movement known as eugenics. For many, eugenics was seen as a secular religion, providing the modern world with a new, biologically based Ten Commandments. Eugenicists planned to create this better world by controlling and improving the inheritance of society's next generation. Despite this rhetoric of social improvement, 20th-century eugenics was associated with racism and ethnic bias, maintenance of the social status quo, support for the powerful over the powerless, and putting the interests of the native born over those of the newcomer. Before it was rejected as poor science and unacceptable social policy, eugenics was used against the interests of large numbers of Americans and against democracy. More contemporary advances in genetics and genomics are at the heart of a number of public policy issues currently being debated as to how this knowledge should be used; this entry provides valuable historical context for some of today's ongoing debates about genetic manipulation.

The history of humankind's desire to construct an explanation for varying levels of human performance and to improve the next generation of human beings can be traced to sources including Plato's (348–347 BCE) classic text, The Republic. In that volume, Socrates explains that human differences are best understood as a reflection of human essences. An individual's behavior is a direct expression of the stuff of which that person is made. And [Page 274]as those essences scale upward in quality from iron and brass to silver to gold, so too do the moral and civic qualities of the citizens who possess them, in this view. To reframe the argument in terms unknown to Plato or Socrates, we are what our genes make us; we are determined by our biology. And some have argued on this basis that human improvement depends primarily on manipulating and improving humanity's biological inheritance.

In the early 20th-century United States, native-born Anglo-Saxon intellectuals had become anxious about their status in the face of rapid social change. Since the end of the Civil War, increases in immigration, urbanization, crime, and social dislocation had transformed U.S. society. Rapid changes were also taking place in the life sciences, and eugenicists drew upon the work of August Weismann and Gregor Mendel to solve these vexing problems. With strong support from eugenicists, laws were passed that required the restriction of immigration from southern and eastern Europe, the segregation of those judged unfit; the rejection of interracial marriage; and forced state-sponsored sterilization. Regarding this last legislation, over 60,000 U.S. citizens were sterilized against their will. At the more popular level, school textbooks lauded the promise of eugenics, motion pictures warned of eugenic decline, and Fitter Families Contests offered medals to those of presumed eugenic excellence.

While not inconsistent with the state of scientific knowledge early in the 20th century, eugenics had lost its scientific support by the end of that century's second decade. Its lack of scientific legitimacy, disregard for human rights, and close association with the European Holocaust sealed its fate. By the end of World War II, early 20th-century eugenics was moribund. However, a combination of 21st-century parents' desire for perfection in their offspring combined with advances in molecular genetics and fertility treatments may make a 21st-century neoeugenics a possibility. It may be feasible to achieve the eugenicists' dream of changing and improving the human germ plasm, to undertake the as yet untested process of genetically modifying in vitro human zygotes. This does not necessarily suggest a return to the racist and antidemocratic eugenics of the past. If, unlike the eugenics of the past, there is to be a politically acceptable and morally responsible eugenics in the future, it will have to maintain currency with advances in life science, sustain a vision of a just society consistent with democratic values, and satisfactorily resolve the ethics of human manipulation.

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