The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published a pair of interesting articles on eugenics, reproductive technologies, medical genetics, and human enhancement (sadly, you need a subscription to access them).
Both are quite interesting and worth reading but I found Ruth Cowan’s position, unambiguously enunciated in her title, “Medical Genetics Is Not Eugenics” somewhat one-dimensional and at times naïve, especially when it comes to her characterization of both technology and the integrity of the medical sciences that we should essentially trust because it is “science” with “good intentions.”
I think the article is important for it reminds us that that we can’t make simple comparisons whereby we collapse past with present, eugenics with medical genetics. It does analytically pay, of course, to pay attention to differences. They matter and often matter for the reasons she highlights, which I will mention in a moment. But to declare the matter closed is far too dangerous in a period when we are still struggling to understand the ethical dilemmas at the heart of many new genetic enterprises and looking to the past, for possible ethical or conceptual connections, may in fact make these more clear.
Here are a few of her basic claims:
“There is, to start with, no meaningful historical connection between the enterprise once called eugenics and the enterprise now called medical genetics.”
“Technological systems are built to achieve certain goals; those goals get hard-wired, as it were, into the components of the system. The chief goal of the eugenicists, “improvement of the race,” was never one of the goals of genetic screening — and it did not become one, even after genomic research had identified the locations of dozens of disease-causing mutations.”
“From the very beginning, the founders of medical genetics — people like Neel, Fritz Fuchs, Michael Kaback, and Robert Guthrie — viewed their basic project as the relief of human suffering, not improvement of the race. Relief of suffering might, in their view, also improve the health of races or populations or societies, but improving the health and well-being of individuals was always their primary goal.”
While I agree with her basic premise—eugenics in the past is not some carbon copy of medical genetics/genetic testing today—there are important reasons to critically engage with current forms of genetic testing through the lens of eugenics in the past. But if we are to take her claim to its logical conclusion, then we should not even bother with this critical exercise; and if we were to simply categorize these two endeavors as radically distinct and unrelated, we would lose an opportunity to cultivate a valuable and critical perspective about the ways in which genetic testing may be replicating some older eugenics logics and biases. Read the rest of this entry »