DON'T BLAME EUGENICS, BLAME POLITICS

Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of Buckingham

University, on how Nazi ideology perverted a science that could still benefit mankind

PROFESSOR SEVERING ANTINORI, a gynaecologist at Rome University, claims that within two years he will have produced the world's first cloned human being. Although he may not prevail by his own deadline, he is a man with a startling track record. It was he who, seven years ago, enabled a 62-year-old woman to give birth using donor eggs. And it was he who, when presented with infertile men whose sperm were consistently immature, succeeded in producing four healthy children by maturing the sperm within the bodies of dead mice.

Antinori says that his achievements will represent 'a landmark in human evolution'. Nor is Antinori alone in his pioneering efforts. Across the globe scientists are proposing, by genetic engineering, to arrest ageing and to prevent whole categories of inherited diseases, including cancer and atherosclerosis.

A landmark in human evolution. Savour that phrase. Antinori's reference to human evolution reveals that we are witnessing nothing less than the rebirth of eugenics. Opponents will say that this is a hideous science. They will evoke the shade of Mengele. They will be right; right at least to say that abominable things have been done in the name of eugenics. What they forget is how widespread the belief in eugenics once was, and that its abuse has almost always been at the hands of politicians and propagandists, not scientists.

The term 'eugenics' was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton from the Greek eugenes, meaning wellborn. Galion, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was once a famous biologist. He was particularly known for his studies on the efficacy of prayer. Noting that millions of people prayed every Sunday for the health of the monarch as head of the Church of England, and also noting that monarchs tended to die younger than ordinary people, he concluded that the average prayer reduced life expectancy by several seconds.

Galton had a more serious side and, admiring the intelligence of his own extended family, he proposed that human intelli gence was inherited. Consequently, Galton argued, a breeding programme might help improve the human race. In 1911 he endowed a chair of eugenics at the University of London.

The university was happy to accept the endowment because by then eugenics was hot. Genetics — the academic study of inheritance — had been galvanised in 1900 by Karl C,orrens of Munich. Correns had rediscovered Mendel's forgotten laws of genetics. With that rediscovery, eugenics, the application of genetics to better the human condition, could accelerate. The discipline had finally found its theoretical rooting.

By 1904, only four years after Correns's publication, Charles Davenport, the leading American eugenicist, had built the world's first eugenics lab at Cold Spring Harbor with money provided by the Carnegie Foundation. He explained that 'the feebleminded, drunkards, sex offenders and criminals are the victims of a recessive gene.'

Inspired by Davenport's claims, the Americans began compulsorily sterilising the afflicted. By 1911 six states of the Union had already legislated the compulsory sterilisation of the mentally unfit and by 1935 no fewer than 27 states had passed such laws. By 1935 California alone had sterilised 9,931 mental defectives. By 1940 over 100,000 US citizens had been sterilised compulsorily.

Other countries followed suit. Here are some of those countries' dates for passing eugenics laws: 1933, Germany and British Columbia in Canada; 1934, Denmark, Norway and Sweden; 1935, Finland; 1936, Estonia; and 1938, Iceland and Switzerland.

Practice differed between countries, but the German Racial Hygiene Courts were typical: an individual was arraigned for being stupid before a panel of three judges, two of whom were doctors, one a lawyer. If found stupid, the individual was compulsorily sterilised.

In Europe, of the Protestant countries, only the UK and Holland resisted eugenics on the grounds of civil liberties (Winston Churchill, who 'wanted the curse of madness to die', was most disappointed) but all the Catholic countries rejected it without hesitation. As the Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton said: 'Eugenicists have discovered how to combine hardening of the heart with softening of the head.'

In Intellectuals and the Masses John Carey chronicled some of the horrific statements of the social Darwinists. H.G. Wells said in 1901: 'The swarms of black, brown, dirtywhite and yellow people have to go. It is their portion to die out.' D.H. Lawrence said in 1921: 'Three cheers for the inventors of poison gas.' George Bernard Shaw said in 1933: 'If we desire a certain type of civilisation we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit in.' And here is W.B. Yeats in 1939 explaining evolutionary mechanism: 'Since improvements in agriculture and industry are threatening to remove the last check on the multiplication of the ineducable masses ... the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been.' As H.G. Wells concluded in 1905, "The extravagant swarms of new births was the essential disaster of the 19th century.'

But eugenics could never alleviate those concerns. In fact, as the eugenicists knew as early as 1917, with the publication of a genetic theory known as the Hardy-Weinberg Principle, sterilising the so-called unfit could never stop the spread of the recessive genes they believed caused unfitness. But this was a truth they kept to themselves. Eugenics was a

good source of grants and of prestige which had put science and scientists at the heart of government, which was where they wanted to stay. As Professor Jennings of Johns Hopkins University boasted in his 1930 Biological Basis of Human Nature: 'Gone are the days when the biologist was an abused creature, his pockets bulging with snakes and newts. The conduct of society is to be based on sound biological maxims!' No wonder the only professional group in Germany before 1933 that could boast that more than half its members were Nazis was the profession of academic biologists. In Hitler they had found their champion.

Germany's criminal abuse of eugenics was never better illustrated than by Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, who was the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, founded in 1927 with money in part provided by the Rockefeller and Loeb foundations in America. Verschuer was a fanatical nationalist, having taken part in the Kapp putsch, and he advocated sterilisation of the mentally unfit well before Hitler came to power. His star pupil was Dr Mengele, the Angel of Death of Auschwitz, and it was to Verschuer that Mengele sent his specimens.

As a young researcher Dr Josef Mengele had done valid work showing how diseases such as cleft lip were inherited, and he had also published good studies on the racial inheritances of jaw shape, comparing Egyptian mummies with Melanesian and European specimens. But with the rise of the Nazis he and Verschuer, anxious for funding, bent their considerable intellects to testifying before the Racial Hygiene Courts on who was Jewish. More than once they protested when a Jew was acquitted. Mengele eventually joined the SS. pursuing his studies on twins in Auschwitz, He was interested in the inheritance of eye colour, and he would kill children with unusually coloured eyes so that he could extract them and send them to Verschuer in Berlin to dissect.

Eugenics has never recovered from its associations with Hitler and the Nazis. Nor should it. Does that mean we should call a halt to all genetics experiments, on the grounds that they are for ever tainted? Should Professor Antinori's work be banned?

It is essential, surely, to winnow out good eugenics from bad eugenics, to separate the science from its abuse. Almost everything the Nazis did was disgusting and pointless; but whether we like it or not the work of that period has not been wholly without influence on subsequent research. One of Verschuer's interests was the inheritance of susceptibility to infectious diseases. Ever since the native Americans had succumbed in their millions to apparently trivial European diseases like measles, scientists had understood that different races and different individuals had inherited different susceptibilities to infectious disease. But what were the genetics of such an inheritance? How many genes were involved and were they dominant or recessive?

By the careful analysis of the incidence of TB between identical and non-identical twins in Germany, Verschuer was able to chronicle the genetics. It was valuable work. During the 1950s two German Jewish émigré geneticists, Hans Griineberg of University College, London and Charlotte Auerbach of Edinburgh University, neither of whom had any reason to defend Verschuer, found that not only was Verschuer's research still being cited by working scientists within the democratic nations, but that it had been of such quality as to open up the very discipline of disease-susceptibility inheritance as an academic subject.

The eugenicists were also interested in the genes for intelligence and for mental disease, During the Nazi era they studied those genes at the Institute of Racial Hygiene and the German Psychiatric Institute, both in Munich. Using similar twin studies to those of Verschuer, Professor Ernst Riidin and his colleagues started to elaborate the genetics of IQ and of diseases such as schizophrenia.

That work was of sufficient value for highly respected postwar geneticists such as John Fraser Roberts and Cedric Carter of the Institute of Child Health of London University (Great Ormond Street Hospital) to build their own work directly on it and to cite it frequently. And, as we all now know, it was the Nazis who, decades before Richard Doll in Oxford, first discovered that smoking induced lung cancer.

Where did it go wrong? Why was Nazi science so perverted? The answer, surely, lies in one man and his odious movement. Hitler was a modern. He not only invented the contemporary party political campaign, but he was also a vegetarian, teetotal antismoker. He was so concerned for animal rights that one of his first legislative acts was to prohibit the boiling alive of lobsters and crabs. He even tried to ban smoking in the Wehrmacht but his generals feared for mutiny. It was in his funding of eugenics that Hitler's government, like other governments, corrupted the scientists and viceversa. It is usual for historians of science to claim that Hiroshima witnessed the death of innocence for science. Actually, one can make a good case for Hiroshima as a humanitarian solution to the Second World War. Science lost its innocence when it sold out to the politicians and propagandists over race. For as long as the eugenicists were only academics they could do little harm, but the moment the politicians adopted their ideas, and the moment they employed the coercive power of the state to impose those ideas, then innocents were sacrificed.

As Matt Ridley argued in Genome, today's eugenics is potentially safe. Like Professor Antinori's in Rome, it is being conducted by individuals on an individual basis. It is not without risk — indeed, we are entering a worrying new world where some people will be cloned while others will be rendered immortal and yet others will have their intelligences and appearances tweaked — but potentially, if applied with discretion, these are benign technologies. Molecular antenatal screens for cystic fibrosis and for muscular dystrophy now allow disease carriers to abort affected foetuses.

Genetics and eugenics, though potentially benign, are obviously too powerful to be left to individual scientists unregulated. But they are also too powerful to be left to governments unregulated. To guide us through the new world of eugenics, we will need institutions that are independent and disinterested. The law already provides one good back-up: a person who clones a damaged individual should be liable for millions of pounds in compensation. But we also need an executive and legislature that are free of commercial or other lobbying pressures.

Unfortunately, the state is now so committed to funding genetics research that it has ceased to be impartial. As.it has shown over GM foods, the state is now in the pocket of the producers, the universities and the science activists. If we are to avoid eugenics horrors in the future, we will have to foster a state that is independent of science, and we will have to foster a science that cannot shelter its abuses behind the power of the state. We can start by stopping all state funding of genetics research. Cloning research needs no state funding; it needs state vigilance and a separation of powers. If the government no longer 'owns' genetics research, it will start to view it more dispassionately.

Some original eugenics laboratories, like the initial eugenic impulse, are still with us. The Cold Spring Harbor lab in the US has long been directed by James Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, who also directed the Human Genorne Project. Cold Spring Harbor may have dropped the term 'eugenics' from its title but it is playing the same game as when it was founded nearly a century ago, studying the human genome to benefit the human race.

And the possible benefits are huge. As long as we can reserve the scientists their freedom but allow them no power, then we should extract the maximum benefits with the minimum of risks. And perhaps posterity will then agree with Professor Antinori's self-assessment that he is marching with evolution.