Eugenics, Reproductive Technologies and "Choice"
By Ruth Hubbard,
GeneWatch
| 12. 31. 2000
Volume 14 Number 1
January 2001
The term eugenics, meaning "wellborn," was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, the scion of an upper-class British family and a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton wrote that he intended it as "a brief word to express the science of improving the stock, which...takes cognizance of all the influences that tend...to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had." Included among the "less suitable" strains of blood were "paupers," "drunkards," and the "feebleminded," loosely defined. So, race and class prejudices were there from the start.
Genetics did not yet exist as a science, though the Czech monk Gregor Mendel published his classic paper in 1865. Mendel's laws of inheritance only became widely known after the paper was rediscovered in 1900. Not long after that, geneticists began to examine patterns of inheritance of human traits such as hair or eye color and of diseases. By constructing family pedigrees, they showed that similar regularities exist in the way human...
Related Articles
CGS is excited to announce the launch of a new anti-eugenics initiative that has been years in the making. Legacies of Eugenics in Science, Medicine, and Technology kicks off with a monthly essay series published at the Los Angeles Review of Books that will expose and contest the reemergence of eugenic ideas in contemporary health sciences, human biotechnology, public health, and medicine. Community and campus-based events featuring the authors are also being planned. The project is a collaboration among CGS...
By Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, First Monday | 04.14.2024
The stated goal of many organizations in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), an imagined system with more intelligence than anything we have ever seen. Without seriously questioning whether such a system can...
By Neel Shah, The Preprint | 04.11.2024
Years ago, I interviewed for a residency position at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Standing before the domed Victorian building at the campus entrance, I couldn’t help but be in awe of the history of the place, the great...
By Judith Levine, The Intercept | 04.04.2024
WHEN THE ALABAMA Supreme Court ruled that fertilized embryos were “extrauterine children,” it did more than imperil the future of in vitro fertilization in Alabama and, potentially, the U.S. The ruling, on the claimed “wrongful death” of frozen embryos...