From small beginnings: to build an anti-eugenic future
By Benedict Ipgrave, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Marcy Darnovsky, Subhadra Das, Charlene Galarneau, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Nora Ellen Groce, Tony Platt, Milton Reynolds, Marius Turda, Robert A Wilson,
The Lancet
| 05. 21. 2022
September, 1921 was unusually hot and New York was sweltering. For the many immigrants who crowded the city's tenements and pavements, one of the few places for relief from the incessant heat was the American Museum of Natural History. That summer the museum presented a new exhibition with rows of human skulls, snapshots of patients in psychiatric institutions, and the preserved brain of a serial killer. It was all terribly macabre. The immigrants among the museum's visitors who read the leaflet distributed at the entrance soon discovered that this exhibition was all about them. It included charts showing how migration eroded societies, statistics from IQ tests of arrivals at Ellis Island, and posters spouting anti-migrant rhetoric. All conveyed the same message: “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” were not welcome here.
Meanwhile, just upstairs the Second International Eugenics Congress was in full swing. The ramifications of this conference would be felt across the world. Leading eugenicists at the conference argued that the science of eugenics would enable the betterment of the human “race” by selective... see more
Related Articles
By Adam Rutherford, The Guardian | 06.19.2022
Photo by Ante Samarzija on Unsplash
It’s a quirk of history that the foundations of modern biology – and as a consequence, some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century – should rely so heavily on peas. Cast your...
By Kit Wilson, The Critic | 06.10.2022
We’re entering an era of almost unfathomable, radical technological change. Elon Musk is getting monkeys to play Pong with just their brains. China is experimenting with genetically-enhanced “super-soldiers”. Neuroscientists in the States are developing “injectable nano-sensors” that can read our...
By John Anderson, The Wall Street Journal | 05.10.2022
“Our Father,” Netflix.
A horror story presented as too much of a horror movie, “Our Father” features interviews with the offspring of fertility doctor Donald Cline, but certainly not all of them. Beginning in 1979, Dr. Cline, by his own...
By Michael Eisenstein , Nature | 05.09.2022
Two companies, Beam Therapeutics and Verve Therapeutics, are leading the charge of base editing therapies to the clinic. Last November, Beam got the green light from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its upcoming BEACON-101 trial that will...