The Unnatural Nature of Science Read online

  These ideas, amplified by Karl Pearson from University College London, received support from a variety of sources, which included Fabians such as Bernard Shaw and psychologists like Havelock Ellis.

  An American, Charles Davenport, was particularly influenced by the idea of eugenics, and in 1904 he persuaded the Carnegie Foundation to set up the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories for the study of human evolution. From his studies on human pedigrees, Davenport came to believe that certain races were feeble-minded. Negroes were biologically inferior; Poles were perceived of as independent and self-reliant, though clannish; Italians tended to crimes of personal violence. He expected the American population to become, through immigration, ‘darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial … more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality’. His aim was to promote negative eugenics – preventing proliferation of the bad. To this end he favoured a selective immigration policy to prevent the contamination of the ‘germ-plasm’ (the genetic information transmitted from parents to offspring) from without, and to deal with ‘badness’ within the present population he tried to prevent reproduction of those whom he considered genetically defective. He was in fact pursuing a policy put forward by a Timothy Nurse in England over 200 years earlier: a gentleman ‘ought be as careful of his race as he is of his horses, where the fairest and most beautiful are made choice of for breed’. Davenport even remarked that it would be a progressive revolution if ‘human matings could be placed upon the same high plane as that of horse breeding’.

  Davenport’s approach to human genetics was in terms of the action of single genes, though he knew of polygenic inheritance – that is, a character being determined by several or many genes – like, for example, skin colour. Thus he suggested that prostitution was due to an ‘innate eroticism’. Yet Davenport saw himself as a scientist who wished to base his ideas on sound investigations. Thousands of Americans were persuaded to fill out their ‘Record of Family Traits’. In 1907 a national Eugenics Education Society was set up in England, and others were formed in America. Though membership was small, the influence of these societies was large, and in the 1920s Fitter Families contests took place at the Kansas Free Fair. The American Society even had a Eugenics Catechism:

  QUESTION: What is the most precious thing in the world?

  ANSWER: The human germ-plasm.

  A further sense of the feeling of the time is given by the contest sponsored by the American Eugenics Society for essays on the decline of ‘Nordic fertility’.

  Much of this information comes from Daniel Kevles’s book In the Name of Eugenics. As Kevles points out, the geneticists warmed to their priestly role, and the list of distinguished scientists that initially gave eugenics positive support is depressingly impressive: Fisher, Haldane, Huxley, Castle, Morgan. According to the American geneticist Herbert Jennings in his 1930 book The Biological Basis of Human Nature, the world is to be operated on scientific principles. The conduct of life and society are to be based, as they should be, on sound biological maxims.

  One approach to negative eugenics was sterilization to prevent contamination of the germ-plasm. It is estimated that between 1907 and 1928 about 9,000 people were so treated in the United States, all of them classified under the general rubric of ‘feeble-minded’. In a famous court case in 1927, Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes gave a judgement in favour of sterilization which included the statement that ‘the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes … Three generations of imbeciles is enough.’

  In the 1930s, Huxley, Haldane, Hogben, Jennings and other biologists at last began to react against many of the wilder claims for eugenics. But it was too late, for the ideas had permeated into mainland Europe. As the geneticist Benno Müller-Hill wrote in his book Murderous Science, ‘The ideology of the National Socialists can be put very simply. They claimed that there is a biological basis for the diversity of mankind. What makes a Jew a Jew, a Gypsy a Gypsy, an asocial individual asocial, and the mentally abnormal abnormal, is in their blood, that is to say in their genes.’ It is hard not to believe that this was based on the genetic ideas of the eugenic movement. For example, Professor Fischer, a Professor of Anthropology and Rector of the University of Berlin, a promulgator of such views, was asked by Davenport in 1929 to become Chairman of the Committee on Racial Crosses of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. Thus it is quite easy to see a direct line from the eugenics movement to the statement by the most famous animal behaviourist Konrad Lorenz:

  It must be the duty of racial hygiene to be attentive to a more severe elimination of morally inferior human beings than is the case today … We should literally replace all factors responsible for selection in a natural free life … In prehistoric times of humanity, selection for endurance, heroism, social usefulness etc. was made solely by hostile outside factors. This role must be assumed by a human organization; otherwise humanity will, for lack of selective forces, be annihilated by the degenerative phenomena that accompany domestication.

  Another metaphor from Lorenz is the ‘analogy between bodies and malignant tumours on the one hand, and a nation and individuals within it who have become asocial because of their defective constitution’.

  In 1933, Hitler’s cabinet promulgated a Eugenic Sterilization Law which can be considered as leading directly to the atrocities by doctors and others in the concentration camps. This law made sterilization compulsory for anyone who suffered from a perceived heredity weakness, including conditions from schizophrenia to blindness.

  Doctors, in general, are not scientists: they are technologists, more like engineers, applying knowledge of human biology. What we have to consider is the responsibility of the scientists who effectively laid the foundation for the genetic theories that underlay the cruder versions of biological determinism – namely, that genetic factors determine complex human behaviour patterns. One cannot dismiss them solely by saying they were bad scientists, for the question of biological determinism – that many human characters like aggression and altruism are genetically programmed – is very much still with us, in the form of sociobiology.

  With the wisdom of hindsight, we may feel smug about how misguided many of the ideas fuelling the eugenics movement were. But, for all we know, many of its supporters were in other respects good and honourable scientists: they were just wrong. They were bad scientists in terms of both the science they did and their obligations.

  The scientists who promoted the views of the eugenics movements may have been honourable with respect to their science. They could, perhaps, plead genuine ignorance or fault in dealing with the data, but they completely failed to examine critically the social implications of their conclusions and to make them public. In fact, much more culpably, their conclusions seem to have been driven by what they saw as the desirable social implications, and they totally failed to inform the public about the likely reliability of their conclusions.

  Scientists have the obligation to examine the social implications of their work, not in order to decide how or if it should be used – that, as in the case of the bomb, is a political decision – but in order to make clear the reliability of the interpretations of the observations. In some areas of science it matters little to the public whether a particular theory is flawed, or even wrong. It matters mainly to the scientists if, say, some of the current ideas about how embryos develop turn out to be wrong. By contrast, it matters a great deal if, as in the case of human genetics, complex behavioural characteristics are treated as being controlled by genes and behavioural influences are ignored. Scientists have an obligation to make the reliability of their views in these sensitive social areas clear to the point of overcautiousness. And the public should, wherever possible, demand the evidence and critically evaluate it.

  What is at issue is how scientists should handle delicate issues like the relationship between race and intelligence. Is research into such areas legitimate?
Or are there, as the literary critic George Steiner has argued that there are, ‘certain orders of truth which would infect the marrow of politics and would poison beyond all cure the already tense relations between social classes and ethnic communities’? In short, he asks whether there are doors immediately in front of current research which are marked ‘too dangerous to open’. Provided the obligations to examine and explain the social implications and to make clear the reliability are fulfilled, my answer to Steiner is a cautious ‘no’. The main reason is that the better the understanding we have of the world, the better the chance we have to make a just society. It is to the credit of the biological community that the debate on the validity of applying to human behaviour ideas of sociobiology derived from studies of animals has been carried on with great vigour.

  When we think about the social responsibility of scientists, we are not primarily concerned with the natural duties of all citizens in our society, such as to help one another, not to inflict unnecessary suffering and so on. According to a contemporary moral philosopher, John Rawls, these duties apply to us all, without regard to certain voluntary choices, such as choice of career, that we have made. By contrast, specific obligations result from our having made a particular choice, such as marrying or standing for public office. So the question is, what obligations above natural duty do scientists, as distinct from other citizens, have to society? To what extent does the privileged knowledge that scientists have entail additional obligations? The issues are not essentially ethical ones, for temptation to immoral acts related to science does not seem to present a special problem, though scientists must not, of course, steal ideas, be fraudulent or fail to take due care with experiments on animals, for example.

  It may be useful, rather, for scientists to make use of Rawls’s first principle, outlined below, when they put forward ideas that have social implications for others – ideas like those suggested by some sociobiologists which encourage ideas about social determinism: that, for example, class structures are socially inevitable, that aggressive impulses towards strangers are part of our evolutionary heritage and that there are basic and ineradicable differences between the sexes that doom women’s hope for genuine equality. They should imagine themselves, following Rawls, in the original position in which the rules for society are being set up, but with none of the parties knowing his or her place in society – there is a veil of ignorance. The parties do not know their sex, their natural abilities or even the generation to which they belong. They are brought together to agree detailed rules based on a general principle of justice. All social values – liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect – are to be distributed equally, unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these values is to everyone’s advantage. The scientists should then consider the reliability they would give to their conclusions in such a situation. Would someone who believes, with deep conviction, that his or her research demonstrates the natural differences of women, or of certain races, still maintain that conviction? For it is quite likely that in this imagined situation he or she might belong to one of those groups. The response might, surprisingly, be ‘yes’, for this could well lead to the preferential distribution of, say, jobs or money to disadvantaged groups, to compensate them at the expense of the advantaged groups if it were established that they were naturally disadvantaged. In this situation, knowledge about presumed inherited differences could be used to design a more just society. A less sensitive example than race is how to teach children of mixed abilities, some of which are directly attributable to genetic differences.

  But we do not live in such an idealized situation. In our real world, conclusions about the biological bases of human attributes and racial differences can feed current prejudices and have a severe negative influence. If any social measures are to be based on scientific knowledge, then the reliability of that knowledge must be made very clear. This is no small problem, but that does not remove the obligation.

  Many people may still not be persuaded by the sharp distinction I draw between scientific knowledge and its application, between science and technology: that doctors and engineers are not necessarily scientists. This distinction is based not on purity or snobbery, but on implementation of knowledge which may be based on science. Nevertheless, there are areas where the boundaries may not at first appear to be very sharp, as in the case of the application of genetic engineering and gene therapy.

  Genetic engineering provides the means for altering the genetic constitution of animals and plants. It offers great hope for solving problems relating to pest control, the excessive use of fertilizers, energy use and a host of other areas. Yet the very term ‘genetic engineering’ conjures up fears about tampering with nature. These fears have a long tradition. According to Greek myth, Poseidon made King Mino’s wife fall in love with a white bull and the result of their union was a monster – the minotaur. In more recent times we have had Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein and H. G. Wells’s Dr Moreau: both created monsters and fed deep-rooted fears about chimeras. This tradition certainly has given biologists involved in any sort of genetic engineering a bad image.

  To focus on a specific issue, it is now possible to insert genes into human cells to correct genetic defects. Should this be done? A distinction must be drawn between insertion of genes into somatic or body cells, which will not be passed on to future generations, and the introduction of genes into germline cells, eggs or sperm, which will result in the genes being passed on to all subsequent generations. The insertion of genes into body cells could provide a powerful technique for correction of major genetic diseases such as sickle-cell anaemia, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, thalassemia and many others. Four thousand disabilities due to single-gene defects are known.

  Why, then, does the prospect of gene therapy of this sort seem to pose major ethical issues? The transferring of genes into body cells does not raise any new ethical issue, since the introduction of new genetic material is routinely done with organ and bone-marrow transplants. Moreover, treatments with radiation and certain drugs themselves alter the genetic material. The safety problems, even if modified viruses are used as carriers to insert the germs, seem to be no different to those involved in any new medical treatment. All new medical interventions carry risks, and there are well-established procedures for introducing new drugs, for example. It is hard to see how anyone could object to curing disabling genetic diseases. The anxieties must rest on the dangers of stepping on to the ‘slippery slope’.

  The slippery slope is where one joins Drs Frankenstein and Moreau. Once there is the possibility of introducing genes into body cells to treat disease and disability, then it is inevitable, so the argument goes, that doctors and scientists will insert genes to change the character of people. Genes could be inserted that would make people taller, handsomer, cleverer and perhaps even happier. And, the argument continues, even if the technique were limited initially to body cells, sooner or later genes would be introduced into the germline.

  But what objection is there to manipulating the genes of somatic cells so as to provide the recipient with what is perceived as some highly desirable quality? Is it any different from cosmetic surgery? Imagine that it were possible by genetic engineering to improve, say, memory or some particular mental skill during an individual’s lifetime. It might be thought that this would be abused, since only those with sufficient money might have access to the treatment. Such a procedure might give some an unfair advantage. There would also be problems of safety, of ensuring that there were no undesirable side-effects. While adults could have a choice, treating children does present an ethical issue. But are these issues really any different to what happens now? Parents give an advantage to their children by giving them private lessons, by sending them to the very best schools. At present, self-improvement is a highly valued social attribute. Jogging may improve the cardiovascular system, bran the bowels, and meditation the whole body. What, then, is wrong with the ‘supermarke
t’ approach in which genes would be available at a price and with suitable warnings about possible side-effects? Why should adults be denied chemicals that may improve our well-being? Individual responsibility and choice, provided the results harm no one else, is fundamental to a democratic society. We might find it distasteful that someone might use gene therapy to change themselves in a particular way, but perhaps it is something we have to live with.

  The possibility in the future of introducing genes into germline cells does raise special problems, because the effects will be passed on. But how different is the choice of introducing genes into the germline from parents choosing to have children knowing that they have a high chance of their child having a genetic defect? If women have the right to bear children infected with AIDS, why cannot mothers choose to have a genetic defect in their eggs corrected? It seems almost immoral not to do so. For to correct the genetic abnormality in this way is to correct it for the descendants forever, and this would lead both to fewer children inheriting the abnormality and to fewer abortions. But the case for introducing genes into the human germline is fraught with dangers. To do so is to make a change for future generations, and the possible chance of things going wrong makes the procedure so risky as to make it, at present, unacceptable. It is banned by law in many countries, including most of Europe and the US. Moreover, prenatal diagnosis and abortion is a preferable approach for genetic diseases and, in the long run, makes germline therapy unnecessary.