by Al Gore
Between 1907 and 1963, over 64,000 people were sterilized under laws similar to Laughlin’s design. He argued that such individuals were burdensome to the state because of the expense of taking care of them. He and others also made the case that the advances in sanitation, public health, and nutrition during the previous century had led to the survival of more “undesirable” people who were reproducing at rates not possible in the past.
What makes the list of traits in Laughlin’s “model law” bizarre as well as offensive is that he obviously believed they were heritable. Ironically, Laughlin was himself an epileptic; thus, under his model legislation, he would have been suitable for forced sterilization. Laughlin’s malignant theories also had an impact on U.S. immigration law. His work on evaluating recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe was influential in forming the highly restrictive quota system of 1924.
As pointed out by Jonathan Moreno in his book The Body Politic, the eugenics movement was influenced by deep confusion over what evolution really means. The phrase “survival of the fittest” did not originate with Charles Darwin, but with his cousin Sir Francis Galton, and was then popularized by Herbert Spencer—whose rival theory of evolution was based on the crackpot ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck argued that characteristics developed by individuals after their birth were genetically passed on to their offspring in the next generation.
A similar bastardization of evolutionary theory was also promoted in the Soviet Union by Trofim Lysenko—who was responsible for preventing the teaching of mainstream genetics during the three decades of his rein in Soviet science. Geneticists who disagreed with Lysenko were secretly arrested; some were found dead in unexplained circumstances. Lysenko’s warped ideology demanded that biological theory conform with Soviet agricultural needs—much as some U.S. politicians today insist that climate science be changed to conform with their desire to promote the unrestrained burning of oil and coal.
Darwin actually taught that it was not necessarily the “fittest” who survived, but rather those that were best adapted to their environments. Nevertheless, the twisted and mistaken version of Darwin’s theory that was reflected in his cousin’s formulation helped to give rise to the notion of Social Darwinism—which led, in turn, to misguided policy debates that in some respects continue to this day.
Some of the early progressives were seduced by this twisted version of Darwin’s theory into believing that the state had an affirmative duty to do what it could to diminish the proliferation of unfavorable Lamarckian traits that they mistakenly believed were becoming more common because prior state interventions had made life easier for these “undesirables,” and had enabled them to proliferate.
The same flawed assumptions led those on the political right to a different judgment: the state should pull back from all those policy interventions that had, in the name of what they felt was misguided compassion, led to the proliferation of “undesirables” in the first place. There were quite a few reactionary advocates of eugenics. At least one of them survives into the twenty-first century—the Pioneer Fund, described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Incidentally, its founding president was none other than Harry Laughlin.
Eugenics also found support, historians say, because of the socioeconomic turmoil of the first decades of the twentieth century—rapid industrialization and urbanization, the disruption of long familiar social patterns, waves of immigration, and economic stress caused by low wages and episodic high unemployment. These factors combined with a new zeal for progressive reform to produce a wildly distorted view of what was appropriate by way of state intervention in heredity.
Although this episode in the world’s history is now regarded as horribly unethical—in part because thirty years after it began, the genocidal crimes of Adolf Hitler discredited all race-based, and many genetics-based, theories that were even vaguely similar to that of Nazism. Nevertheless, some of the subtler lessons of the eugenics travesty have not yet been incorporated into the emerging debate over current proposals that some have labeled “neo-eugenics.”
One of the greatest challenges facing democracies in this new era is how to ensure that policy decisions involving cutting-edge science are based on a clear and accurate understanding of the science involved. In the case of eugenics, the basic misconception traced back to Lamarck concerning what is inheritable and what is not contributed to an embarrassing and deeply immoral policy that might have been avoided if policymakers and the general public had been debating policy on the basis of accurate science.
It is worth noting that almost a century after the eugenics tragedy, approximately half of all Americans still say they do not believe in evolution. The judgments that must be made within the political system of the United States in the near future—and in other countries—are difficult enough even when based on an accurate reading of the science. When this inherent difficulty is compounded by flawed assumptions concerning the science that gives rise to the need to make these decisions, the vulnerability to mistaken judgments goes up accordingly.
As will be evident in the next chapter, the decisions faced by civilization where global warming is concerned are likewise difficult enough when they are based on an accurate reading of the science. But when policymakers base arguments on gross misrepresentations of the science, the degree of difficulty goes up considerably. When gross and willful misunderstandings of the science are intentionally created and reinforced by large carbon polluters who wish to paralyze the debate over how to reduce CO2 emissions, they are, in my opinion, committing a nearly unforgivable crime against democracy and against the future well-being of the human species.
In a 1927 opinion by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the U.S. Supreme Court upheld one of the more than two dozen state eugenics laws. The case, Buck v. Bell, involved the forcible sterilization of a young Virginia woman who was allegedly “feeble-minded” and sexually promiscuous. Under the facts presented to the court, the young woman, Carrie Buck, had already had a child at the age of seventeen. In affirming the state’s right to perform the sterilization, Holmes wrote that, “Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
A half century after the Supreme Court decision, which has never been overturned, the director of the hospital where Buck had been forcibly sterilized tracked her down when she was in her eighties. He found that, far from being an “imbecile,” Buck was lucid and of normal intelligence. Upon closer examination of the facts, it became obvious that they were not as represented in court. Young Carrie Buck was a foster child who had been raped by a nephew of one of her foster parents, who then committed her to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in order to avoid what they feared would otherwise be a scandal.
As it happens, Carrie’s mother, Emma Buck—the first of the three generations referred to by Justice Holmes—had also been committed to the same asylum under circumstances that are not entirely clear, although testimony indicated that she had syphilis and was unmarried when she gave birth to Carrie. In any case, the superintendent of the Virginia Colony, Albert Priddy, was eager to find a test case that could go to the Supreme Court and provide legal cover for the forced sterilizations that his and other institutions already had under way. He declared Buck “congenitally and incurably defective”; Buck’s legal guardian picked a lawyer to defend her in the case who was extremely close to Priddy and a close friend since childhood to the lawyer for the Colony, a eugenics and sterilization advocate (and former Colony director) named Aubrey Strode.
Historian Paul Lombardo of Georgia State University, who wrote an extensively researched book on the case, wrote that the entire proceeding was “based on deceit and betrayal.… The fix was in.” Buck’s appointed defense counsel put forward no witnesses and no evidence, and conceded the description of his client as a “middle-grade moron.” Harry Laughlin, who had never met Carrie Buck, her mother, or her daughter, t
estified to the court in a written statement that all three were part of the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.”
As for the third generation of Bucks, Carrie’s daughter, Vivian, was examined at the age of a few weeks by a nurse who testified: “There is a look about it that is not quite normal.” The baby girl was taken from her family and given to the family of Carrie’s rapist. After making the honor roll in school, Vivian died of measles in the second grade. Incidentally, Carrie’s sister, Doris, was also sterilized at the same institution (more than 4,000 sterilizations were performed there), though doctors lied to her about the operation when it was performed and told her it was for appendicitis. Like Carrie, Doris did not learn until much later in her life why she was unable to have children.
The “model legislation” put forward by Laughlin, which was the basis for the Virginia statute upheld by the Supreme Court, was soon thereafter used by the Third Reich as the basis for their sterilization of more than 350,000 people—just as the psychology-based marketing text written by Edward Bernays was used by Goebbels in designing the propaganda program surrounding the launch and prosecution of Hitler’s genocide. The Nazis presented Laughlin with an honorary degree in 1936 from the University of Heidelberg for his work in the “science of racial cleansing.”
Shamefully, eugenics was supported by, among others, President Woodrow Wilson, Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger, who founded the movement in favor of birth control—an idea that was, at the time, more controversial than eugenics—and by Theodore Roosevelt after he left the White House. In 1913, Roosevelt wrote in a letter,
It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum. Yet we fail to understand that such conduct is rational compared to the conduct of a nation which permits unlimited breeding from the worst stocks, physically and morally, while it encourages or connives at the cold selfishness or the twisted sentimentality as a result of which the men and women who ought to marry, and if married have large families, remain celibates or have no children or only one or two.
Sanger, for her part, disagreed with the methods of eugenics advocates, but nevertheless wrote that they were working toward a goal she supported: “To assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit.” One of Sanger’s own goals in promoting contraception, she wrote in 1919, was, “More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief issue of birth control.”
The United States is not the only democratic nation with a troubling history of forced sterilization. Between 1935 and 1976, Sweden forcibly sterilized more than 60,000 people, including “mixed-race individuals, single mothers with many children, deviants, gypsies and other ‘vagabonds.’ ” For forty years, from 1972 to 2012, Sweden required sterilization before a transgendered person could officially change his or her gender identification on government identification documents. However, the Stockholm Administrative Court of Appeal found the law unconstitutional in December 2012. Sixteen other European countries continue to have similar laws on the books, including France and Italy. Only a few countries are considering revisions to the laws, despite the lack of any scientific or medical basis for them.
In Uzbekistan, forced sterilizations apparently began in 2004 and became official state policy in 2009. Gynecologists are given a quota of the number of women per week they are required to sterilize. “We go from house to house convincing women to have the operation,” said a rural surgeon. “It’s easy to talk a poor woman into it. It’s also easy to trick them.”
In China, the issue of forced abortions has resurfaced with the allegations by escaped activist Chen Guangcheng, but the outgoing premier Wen Jiabao has publicly called for a ban not only on forced abortion, but also of “fetus gender identification.” Nevertheless, many women who have abortions in China are also sterilized against their will. In India, although forcible sterilization is illegal, doctors and government officials are paid a bonus for each person who is sterilized. These incentives apparently lead to widespread abuses, particularly in rural areas where many women are sterilized under false pretenses.
The global nature of the revolution in biotechnology and the life sciences—like the new global commercial realities that have emerged with Earth Inc.—means that any single nation’s moral, ethical, and legal judgments may not have much impact on the practical decisions of other nations. Some general rules about what is acceptable, what is worthy of extra caution, and what should be prohibited have been tentatively observed, but there is no existing means for arriving at universal moral judgments about these new unfolding capabilities.
CHINA AND THE LIFE SCIENCES
As noted earlier, China appears determined to become the world’s superpower in the application of genetic and life science analysis. The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), which is leading China’s commitment to genomic analysis, has already completed the full genomes of fifty animal and plant species, including silk worms, pandas, honeybees, rice, soybeans, and others—along with more than 1,000 species of bacteria. But China’s principal focus seems to be on what is arguably the most important, and certainly the most intriguing, part of the human body that can be modified by the new breakthroughs in life sciences and related fields: the human brain and the enhancement and more productive use of human intelligence.
Toward this end, in 2011 the BGI established China’s National Gene Bank in Shenzhen, where it has been seeking to identify which genes are involved in determining intelligence. It is conducting a complete genomic analysis of 2,000 Chinese schoolchildren (1,000 prodigies from the nation’s best schools, and 1,000 children considered of average intelligence) and matching the results with their achievements in school.
In the U.S., such a study would be extremely controversial, partly because of residual revulsion at the eugenics scandal, and partly because of a generalized wariness about linking intelligence to family heritage in any society that values egalitarian principles. In addition, many biologists, including Francis Collins, who succeeded James Watson as the leader of the Human Genome Project, have said that it is currently scientifically impossible in any case to link genetic information about a child to intelligence. However, some researchers disagree and believe that eventually genes associated with intelligence may well be identified.
Meanwhile, the speed with which advances are being made in mapping the neuronal connections of the human brain continue to move forward significantly faster than the progress measured by Moore’s Law in the manufacturing of integrated circuits. Already, the connectome of a species of nematode, which has only 302 neurons, has been completed. Nevertheless, with an estimated 100 billion neurons in an adult human brain and at least 100 trillion synaptic connections, the challenge of fully mapping the human connectome is a daunting one. And even then, the work of understanding the human brain’s functioning will have barely begun.
In that regard, it is worth remembering that after the completion of the first full sequencing of the human genome, scientists immediately realized that the map of genes was only their introduction to the even larger task of mapping all of the proteins that are expressed by the genes—which themselves adopt multiple geometric forms and are subject to significant biochemical modifications after they are translated by the genes.
In the same way, once the connectome is completed, brain scientists will have to turn to the role of proteins in the brain. As David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, puts it, “Neuroscience is obsessed with neurons because our best technology allows us to measure them. But each individual neuron is in fact as complicated as a city, with millions of proteins inside of it, trafficking and interacting in extraordinarily complex biochemical cascades.”
Still, even at t
his early stage in the new Neuroscience Revolution, scientists have learned how to selectively activate specific brain systems. Exploiting advances in the new field of optogenetics, scientists first identify opsins—light-sensitive proteins from green algae (or bacteria)—and place into cells their corresponding genes, which then become optical switches for neurons. By also inserting genes that correspond to other proteins that glow in green light, the scientists were then able to switch the neuron on and off with blue light, and then observe its effects on other neurons with a green light. The science of optogenetics has quickly advanced to the point where researchers are able to use the switches to manipulate the behavior and feelings of mice by controlling the flow of ions (charged particles) to neurons, effectively turning them on and off at will. One of the promising applications may be the control of symptoms associated with Parkinson’s disease.
Other scientists have inserted multiple genes from jellyfish and coral that produce different fluorescent colors—red, blue, yellow, and gradations in between—into many neurons in a process that then allows the identification of different categories of neurons by having each category light up in a different color. This so-called “brainbow” allows a much more detailed visual map of neuronal connections. And once again, the Global Mind has facilitated the emergence of a powerful network effect in brain research. When a new element of the brain’s intricate circuitry is deciphered, the knowledge is widely dispersed to other research teams whose work in decoding other parts of the connectome is thereby accelerated.
