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SPRING 2016 45
he human race today stands at a
threshold unlike any in the past:
it now possesses tools to
reshape its own hereditary
capacities, perhaps even to
realize the dream of eugenicists
that human beings might take
charge of their own evolution.
Over a long time, CRISPR
could change the future of humanity, but no one is
rushing into it. As President Barack Obama’s science
adviser John Holdren has said, human germline
editing “is a line that should not be crossed at this
time.” e question is, will anyone be able to police
that line? We are living in the age of biocapitalism,
and it is entirely possible that commercial and
consumer interests could nd a way around the
current commitments and controls of governments.
at is an ironic outcome. As anyone who lived
in the twentieth century knows, “eugenics” is a dirty
word largely because of its association with abusive
governments, particularly the Nazis, but also as a
result of race-improvement policies in the United
States. Politically, it’s an untouchable third rail. But
scientically, it’s now far more plausible than it
ever was. With the advent of a new way to modify
humans—by transforming their genes, rather than
through breeding and extermination—it’s not overly
alarmist to say eugenics, or whatever we call it this
time, could come back, only in a new, private form
shaped by the dynamics of democratic consumer
culture.
What could happen now is likely to be far more
bottom-up than the top-down, state-directed racial
programs of the past. We could see individuals and
DANIEL J. KEVLES
The History of Eugenics
families choosing to edit their genes, whether to
prevent illness or improve capacity or looks, and
nding themselves encouraged to do so by what
was absent in the era of eugenics: the biotechnology
industry. Politicians are largely unaware of this
possibility, but before long they’re going to have to
take notice, especially if public demand starts to
produce gene-editing services willy-nilly, perhaps at
oshore clinics.
Examining why the dream of human biological
improvement foundered in the past may help us
understand why it may gain support in the future.
e dream originated a century and a half ago with
the British scientist and explorer Francis Galton,
a younger rst cousin of Charles Darwin’s. It was
Galton who dubbed the idea “eugenics,” a word he
took from the Greek root meaning “good in birth” or
“noble in heredity.” It was well known that by careful
selection, farmers and ower fanciers could obtain
permanent breeds of plants and animals strong in
particular traits. Galton, who believed that not only
physical features but mental and moral capacities
were inherited, wondered, “Could not the race of
men be similarly improved?”
Aer the turn of the twentieth century, Galton’s
ideas coalesced into a broadly popular movement
that enlisted the new science of genetics and
attracted the support of such luminaries as Teddy
Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes. ey aimed, as Galton had said, to multiply
society’s “desirables” and get rid of its “undesirables.”
A key problem was the diculty of nding
non-coercive means of multiplying the desirables.
Galton proposed that the state sponsor compet-
itive examinations in hereditary merit, celebrate
46 ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
the blushing winners in a public ceremony, foster
wedded unions among them at Westminster Abbey,
and encourage, by postnatal grants, the spawning
of numerous eugenically golden ospring. But only
the Nazis were willing, in practice, to enlist the state,
establishing subsidies to racially meritorious couples
in proportion to the number of children they bore.
Heinrich Himmler urged members of the SS to father
numerous children with racially preferred women,
and in 1936 he instituted the Lebensborn—spa-like
homes where SS mothers, married and unmarried,
might receive the best medical care during their
connements.
Human improvers in the United States and
Britain followed the route of voluntarism. Eugenics
sympathizers such as Teddy Roosevelt, worried by
the declining birth rate among their class, urged its
women to bear more children for the good of the
race. During the 1920s, taking a leaf from Galton’s
book, they sponsored Fitter Family competitions in
the “human stock” section of state agricultural fairs.
At the 1924 Kansas Free Fair, winning families in the
three categories—small, average, and large—were
awarded a Governor’s Fitter Family Trophy. It is
hard to know what made these families stand out
as t, but an indicator is supplied by the fact that all
entrants had to take an IQ test—and the Wasserman
test for syphilis.
Yet social-radical eugenicists, of whom there
were a number on both sides of the Atlantic, were
impatient with measures that sought to achieve
human improvement within the constraints of
conventional marriage and conception. A towering
gure among them was J.B.S. Haldane, a brilliant
British geneticist and evolutionary theorist. In 1924,
in a slim book titled Daedalus, he laid out a method
for producing human biological improvement that
went far beyond urging high-class people to have
more babies and behave well. e method centered
on “ectogenesis”—the conception and nurturing of
fetuses in glass vessels using gametes selected from a
small number of superior men and women. Haldane
predicted that the resulting ospring would be “so
undoubtedly superior to the average that the advance
in each generation in any single respect, from the
increased output of rst-class music to the decreased
convictions for the, is very startling.”
Aldous Huxley brilliantly spelled out the
dystopian potential of Haldane’s scheme in Brave
Ne w Worl d. But Herman J. Muller joined with a
collaborator in Britain named Herbert Brewer to
agitate for the realization of Haldane’s goal by the use
of articial insemination.
Brewer was a scientically self-educated letter
carrier and Muller an innovative experimental
geneticist who would eventually win a Nobel Prize.
Both men held, as Brewer put it, that if the salvation
of the human species required socialism “to make
a better world to live in,” it also required eugenics
“to make better men to live in the world.” Both men
fastened on articial insemination to achieve that
purpose because, although it was an imperfectly
reliable technology, it was being used successfully
with animals, was making headway among women,
and took advantage of the fact that men produced
millions of times more sperm than women produced
eggs. It would thus enable a small number of superior
men annually to father thousands of comparable
children.
In his 1935 book, Out of the Night, Muller declared
that “in the course of a paltry century or two...it
would be possible for the majority of the population
to become of the innate quality of such men as
Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar
Khayyám, Pushkin, Sun Yat-sen…or even to possess
their varied faculties combined.” Would thousands
of women willingly make themselves vessels for the
sperm of great men? Assuredly yes, both Muller and
Brewer predicted. Muller condently explained: “How
many women, in an enlightened community devoid
of superstitious taboos and of sex slavery, would be
eager and proud to bear and rear a child of Lenin or
of Darwin! Is it not obvious that restraint, rather than
compulsion, would be called for?”
What proved obvious was the opposite. Muller
and Brewer were naïve in assuming that thousands
of women would break out of the day’s conventional
child-bearing practices and standards.
Ultimately, the dreams of all the eugenicists went
awry for a variety of reasons—not least because of
increasingly controversial eorts by governments to
get rid of the undesirables from the top down. Many
U.S. states enacted laws authorizing compulsory
sterilization of people considered unworthy and
sterilized some 36,000 hapless victims by 1941. e
Nazis went much further, subjecting several hundred
thousand people to the gonadal knife and eventually
herding some 6 million Jews—their ultimate undesir-
ables—into the death camps.
Postwar developments
Aer World War II, eugenics became a dirty word.
Muller, now an anti-eugenicist, revived a version of
his and Brewer’s idea in 1959, calling it Germinal
Choice. Despite Muller’s disapproval, a wealthy
plastic-eyeglass maker established a sperm bank for
SPRING 2016 47
GENE–EDITING SUMMIT
DANIEL KOHN, Instance of a DataSet, Floor 2 (Month 9), 2013.
2008-06-13--019-026 (opposite) and 2011-01-31--001-009 (below), Watercolor on paper panels later
reproduced as archival prints integrated into Floor 2 of Instance of a DataSet.
48 ISSUES IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Germinal Choice in Southern California to make
the gametes of Nobel laureates available to women
eager to improve the quality of the gene pool.
Few women—only 15 by the mid-1980s—availed
themselves of the opportunity.
e voluntarist multiplication of desirables,
whether socially conventional or radical, was also
problematic for technical and moral reasons. e
aim of producing more desirables called on people
to invest their reproductive resources in the service
of a public good—the quality of what they called
“the race” or, as we would say, the population or the
gene pool. But, by and large, people have children to
satisfy themselves, not to fuel some brave new world.
Moreover, it was—to say the least—uncertain that
the sperm of one of Muller’s heroes would produce
ospring of comparable powers. And at the time,
Haldane’s ectogenesis was technically unrealizable;
no one knew how to produce test-tube babies. e
reliance on articial insemination was a vexed
strategy. It was oensive under prevailing moral
standards, which counted articial insemination by
a donor who was not the woman’s husband a form of
adultery and which stigmatized single women who
bore children.
But now, just about all sexual and reproductive
practices among consenting adults are acceptable,
and although no one knows what genes may
contribute to exceptional talent, biologists possess
precise and increasing knowledge of which
ones gure in numerous diseases and disorders.
And CRISPR oers the prospect of biological
improvement not for the sake of the gene pool, but
for whatever advantages it oers to consumers.
Indeed, perhaps the most potent force driving its
use will be consumer demand aimed at achieving
the health of individuals ill with a genetic disease
or improvement of the genetic prole in succeeding
generations.
During the rst third of the twentieth century,
hundreds of men and women wrote to the Eugenics
Record Oce, in Cold Spring Harbor, New York,
asking for advice about what kind of children they
might produce. In oering advice, eugenic experts
had nothing to go on except analyses of family
pedigrees for deleterious traits, a strategy fraught
with epistemological and prejudicial pitfalls. Still, the
demand for advice continued aer the post-World
War II decline of the eugenics movement, providing
a clientele for the increasingly medically oriented
service of genetic counseling. e demand was
multiplied in the latter half of the century by a series
of technical advances that enabled prenatal diagnosis
DANIEL KOHN, 2007-03-07--001-009 (above) and 2008-06-13--027-035 (opposite).
Watercolor on paper panels later reproduced as archival prints integrated into Floors 1 and 2 of
Instance of a DataSet, 2013.
SPRING 2016 49
such as good schools or biomedical interventions
such as the administration of human growth
hormone. ey might readily cross the line between
germline medical treatment and enhancement if
today’s enhancement—say, the ability to do complex
computing—turns into an essential capacity, like
language, tomorrow.
Whatever purpose they might choose for
germline editing, the contemporary right to repro-
ductive freedom would assist their pursuit of it. e
ospring would not be test-tube products of Huxley’s
fascist, anti-family reproductive technology. ey
would be babies born of women, not conditioned
but nurtured as much or as little as any other child.
As early as 1989, at the beginning of the Human
Genome Project, the journal Trends in Biotechnology
pointedly noted: “’Human improvement’ is a fact of
life, not because of the state eugenics committee, but
because of consumer demand. How can we expect to
deal responsibly with human genetic information in
such a culture?”
How indeed, we might further ask amid the
increasing commercialization of biomedicine.
Biotechnology companies have rapidly embraced
CRISPR/Cas9, exploring new ways to treat patients
with genetic diseases. If they nd methods of
safely editing human germlines for medical or
enhancement aims, they would likely pressure regu-
lators to permit their use and, as they do with drugs,
heavily advertise their availability to consumers.
As Haldane observed in Daedalus, biological
innovations initially regarded as repugnant tend
eventually to become commonplace. Just as it
occurred with articial insemination, so it may
happen in the age of biocapitalism with human
germline editing.
Daniel J. Kevles, a former professor of history at
Caltech and Yale University, is an interdisciplinary
fellow at the New York University School of Law. A
longer version of this article was published in Politico.
for aws in a fetus’s genes and that, coupled with Roe
v. Wade , permitted prospective parents to abort a
troubled fetus.
e ability to have a healthy child—or, for infertile
couples, to have a child at all—was further amplied
by the advent in the late 1970s of in vitro fertilization
(IVF)—that is, the joining of sperm and egg in a
petri dish. Here was Haldane’s ectogenesis, only with
the insertion of the resulting embryo into a woman’s
womb. e method was pioneered by the British
scientists Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards, who
rst conducted pioneering research—it eventually
won a Nobel Prize—on conception and early
gestation. At the time, they faced moral condem-
nation from scientists and ethicists for experimenting
with an ultimate child without its consent and
for bringing about, in the vein of Haldane, a test-
tube-baby eugenics.
ey eectively rebutted the warnings of their
critics with the birth, on July 25, 1978, of Louise
Brown, the world’s rst test-tube baby, perfectly
formed and healthy, a joy to her hitherto infertile
mother. But Edwards had predicted that IVF could
also be used to check embryos fertilized in a petri
dish for genetic or chromosomal aws with the aim of
implanting one free of them. IVF is now used for that
purpose as well as for assisting infertile couples. It is
not hard to imagine couples taking the next step—
exploiting IVF to modify pre-implantation embryos
by replacing a disease gene with a healthy one.
What seemed like a moral or technical issue in
the past is—in this society—very likely to become a
consumer question of who can aord it. Will parents
want to use germline modication to enhance a
child’s genetic endowment? Will they be willing
to insert into their embryonic ospring a set of
genes—should any such set ever be identied—
associated with extraordinary mental, physical, or
artistic capacities? Conceivably, yes, given what they
already do, if they can aord it, to advantage their
children through environmental encouragements
GENE–EDITING SUMMIT
