Читать книгу The Shape of Shit to Come - Steve Lowe - Страница 8

There is a question underlying all this genetical jiggery-pokery and that question is this: is all this genetics just eugenics under another name? Stamping out impurities in the human gene pool? Many are touchy about this kind of thing. If we did manage to phase a ‘psychopath gene’ out of the gene pool, would that not be a good thing? Or are you some kind of psychopath fan? Then again, mastering nature to breed a race of supermen: isn’t this just a teeny bit Nazi? It does sound a bit Nazi. It’s probably the words ‘master’, ‘race’, ‘breed’ and ‘supermen’.

The word genetics replaced eugenics as the name for the field after certain mid-twentieth-century embarrassments. The word ‘eugenics’ is derived from the Greek for ‘good in birth’ and was coined by Victorian polymath Francis Galton who believed inherited physical problems caused much misery. If we bred from the best specimens and made people happier and cleverer, life would be generally better. But the ‘best’ of humanity, it turned out, were the gentryfolk like Galton while the ‘worst’ were the urban poor, who drank and swore and wore clogs and suchlike. (He wrote some hilarious blogs about ‘chav scum’).

And it’s not just Nazis who have been a bit Nazi about all this. By 1927, many US states had eugenics laws permitting them to sterilise people deemed ‘imbeciles’. They rowed back from – but thoroughly debated – the idea of gassing people. In Britain, in 1913, the Liberal Government passed the Mental Deficiency Act which early supporters, like Winston Churchill, had initially hoped would sanction sterilisation of ‘the feeble minded and insane classes’. The last time the USA sterilised someone was … 1972. (On US soil, that is; attaching electrodes to Iraqi nads doesn’t count.) In 1995, good old ‘socialist’ China passed a law limiting the right of low-IQ people to reproduce.

So is all gene-related work essentially ‘eugenics’ under another name? Well, yes. But there is clearly a difference between hindering the spread of cancer and hindering the spread of alleged imbeciles.

We have moved on from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s jolly pronouncement about the twenties US laws: ‘We want people who are healthy, good-natured, emotionally stable, sympathetic, and smart. We do not want idiots, imbeciles, paupers, and criminals.’

I mean, he’s right in a way: who does want idiots, imbeciles, paupers and criminals? Not me. Not after last time. But most would now agree that fascistically stopping people breeding is not really helping anyone and the USA for one has a far more enlightened attitude to imbeciles – sometimes even making them president.

But trying not to slip into being a teeny bit fascist remains a big issue with genetics. Most are pretty careful to avoid muddying the waters, though this cannot really be said for James Watson, the American genetics legend who, with Francis Crick, discovered DNA in a Cambridge pub in 1952 and now runs one of America’s leading scientific research institutions. In 2004, pondering genetic engineering’s potential uses, this figurehead wondered if there was any harm in breeding ‘pretty girls’ (he really likes pretty girls).

More controversial was his contention that being ‘really stupid’ is ‘a disease’ that we could also try banishing from the gene pool. Still, at least he wasn’t being racist or anything. Oh, no, hang on …

He also claimed that black people were less intelligent than white, which definitely sounds like the sort of thing that people call racist. Yes, he did acknowledge that modern science claimed all human groups were intellectually equal, but ‘people who have to deal with black employees find this not true’.

Man alive.