...biotechnology for the new century.
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http://www.biotechcentury.com/articles/WhatsHot/HowtheUSmanufacturedeugenicsfortheNazis.shtmlHow the US manufactured eugenics for the Nazis
Nigel M. de S. Cameron
BioWorld.9.03
"Unfinished Business"
The biggest idea of the 21st century – mark my words! – will be a dated neologism from the 20th. Eugenics is set for a come-back and will speak the mother of all battles for the human race.
That’s why Edwin Black’s new book The War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls, 2003) is so timely, taking us back in depressing detail to the vast and enormously popular eugenics industry that caught the diseased imagination of the United States in the first part of the last century. Its epigram - and epitaph - could be Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ notorious words, graven on the hearts of unnumbered men, women and children whose lives were blighted by the eugenics cause, in the Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell: “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”
Carrie Buck’s sad story is well known, immortalized in this judgment which has been compared to Dred Scott in its infamy. We know also that Holmes, the most distinguished jurist of his generation, was that same Holmes who speech on “The Path of the Law” was a manifesto for positivism and the idea that law is just what the victors declare it to be, a nightmare that could hardly be better illustrated than in the eugenics tale that Edwin Black lays out.
I took his large book away to read on vacation, and was startled on my return to look again at that fine 60s movie on the trial of the Nazi doctors, Judgment at Nuremberg, which is focused chiefly on the Nazi sterilization program - and see the brilliant defense offered by their counsel who argued over and over that they had done nothing that had not been done before in the United States; that the sterilization law passed early in the Hitler regime (and lauded, as Black notes, by American eugenicists) was almost a mirror of the model legislation that had been enacted in state after state, had led to tens of thousands of forcible sterilizations of US citizens, and had been upheld in the Supreme Court. And then the Nazi counsel quotes Justice Holmes at the American judges who are weighing the fate of his clients.
Black goes much further. He chronicles the history of eugenics in the US such as the Eugenics Record Office, based at Cold Spring Harbor and purely private despite its name, which accumulated huge quantities of “eugenic” records of unconsenting individuals from public institutions. He demonstrates US leadership in the worldwide movement, and the support of American statesmen for the project – such that the US Secretary of State sent out the invitations to the first worldwide eugenics conferences. And he sets out in damning detail the intricate linkages between foundations such as Rockefeller and the eugenics research of the Nazis themselves – such that just before the outbreak of war Josef Mengele’s university boss is still supported by American foundation money.
Eugenics is an idea whose time seemed to have come in the early 20th century. But since the Nazis liked it and took its to its logical conclusion, it soon disappeared from respectable company. Black notes that “eugenics” quickly morphed into “genetics,” and he looks ahead to “newgenics” as the Carrie Buck mindset makes a comeback in the biotech age.
Read the book as, one hundred years later, we devise our strategy for the next round in the “war against the weak.” Because we can be quite sure that the “Master Race” ideology, sophisticated in its science and rhetoric beyond the dreams of Holmes and Hitler, is on its way.
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