1. Welcome!

2. “Knowing science does not teach us how to live well with its power
“Knowing science does not teach us how to live well with its power.” ~Sheila Jasanoff

3. What I’m doing. Brief history of Eugenics Carrie Buck
Scientific Legacy of Eugenics
CRISPR/Cas9 and Jasanoff

4. Eugenics
I’ll try to keep this light, but Eugenics was not our best moment historically. And if we make it all the way to the end, there may be a bucket of sloths in it for you. Who here has heard of eugenics before now? If you have, it’s probably because of this guy…

5. The Nazis made eugenics infamous, and the Nuremburg doctor’s trial was the impetus for the creation of the various codes of conduct such as the Declaration of Helsinki and the Declaration of Geneva, both of which form cornerstones of research ethics, especially for research on a certain great ape. But while the Nazis made it infamous, they learned it from us.

6. But what does it actually mean
But what does it actually mean? Eugenics literally translates to “Well Born” or “Good Stock.” It is the science, and I’ll use that term lightly, of improving human ability via controlled breeding.

7. This picture is the logo from the Second International Eugenics Conference in (Read slide) And you may start to see how this particular lecture relates to your reading for this week.

8. Not unlike what we’ve done to these guys. But how did it start?

9. This Guy.
You may recognize this portrait. It’s Charles Darwin. In 1859 he published a book you may have heard of.

10. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
That title is probably longer than you remember. This was the first edition’s title. The portion after the comma was removed for later versions of the book. Now, Darwin understood the ramifications of his work, so he intentionally left out any mention of humans in this book. He did, ultimately make the connection in his next book, published in 1871, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. However, that came a couple years after the guy who really started it all…

11. This Guy.
This is Francis Galton. He was a British Mathematician, sociologist, meteorologist and polymath. In 1869 he wrote a book directly inspired by Darwin’s Origin called, Hereditary Genius. He did a quantitative, statistical study that found that eminent men (those of wealth and talent) were more likely to be related to each other than pure chance should allow. This statistical trend improved the more closely you were related to other eminent men. So, sons and brothers were more likely to both be eminent than cousins or nephews, and so on. He believed this showed that talent and ability were hereditary, and then posited that human stock could be improved by encouraging the best humans to breed and discouraging the more degenerate classes from it.

12. Actually…
Ok, now even in the 1850s, the idea of human stock being improved or denigrated was not new. Plato called for the creation of a Guardian Class in Republic in 380 BC. This guardian class would be created through the breeding of only those people with the best, or Golden, souls, and they would be the protectors of the realm; soldiers, police, and even judges. Thomas Malthus, more recently than Plato (in 1798), but still before Darwin, first brought up the apparent fact that while population increases geometrically, food production increases linearly, and that the lower classes of people (peasants, farmers, etc) generally had more children than the nobility. He claimed that this would inevitably lead to cycles of famine and disease brought on by lack of resources, and the ones at fault would be the lower classes. So, this general idea was not new even in Darwin and Galton’s time.

13. But back to This Guy.
Galton later coined the term “Eugenics” defining it as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.” Based on the idea that “degeneracy” and immoral behavior is inheritable and thus can be bred out of a population. Underlying all of this is a belief that if one is intelligent enough, and talented enough, one should easily be able to become eminent, to avoid or escape poverty, to avoid criminal behavior and sexual excess, and to become a productive member of society. You may start to hear echoes of neoliberal and libertarian talking points, here… that will continue… and is important, but is probably not something we can fit into today’s discussion.

14. Speaking of “Degenerate”…
So, what were considered “degenerate” traits?

15. “Degenerate” traits targeted by Eugenics
Poverty
A family that lives in poverty will be more likely to produce children who continue to live in poverty. The inability to lift oneself out of poverty was seen as an individual, inherent, hereditary failing of the people involved. It is notable that Ayn Rand published her novels around the end of World War Two, and so may have been influenced by eugenic thought.

16. “Degenerate” traits targeted by Eugenics
Poverty
Congenital Physical Disability
Especially the Blind and Deaf, but also Epileptics, those with congenital amputations, Down’s Syndrome, or other birth defects.

17. “Degenerate” traits targeted by Eugenics
Poverty
Congenital Physical Disability
Promiscuity and Sexual
Deviance
Promiscuity was a feature unacceptable mostly for women. For men, the main targets were generally homosexuals, cross-dressers and other gender-nonconforming folk. This was generally spoken of under the lovely euphemism “Social or Moral hygiene.” It was about cleansing one’s society or morals of the contaminants that were perceived to hold it back. We will come back to this idea of purity.
These particular deviances were often considered to be a part of the final category, however…

18. “Degenerate” traits targeted by Eugenics
Poverty
Congenital Physical Disability
Promiscuity and Sexual Deviance
Mental Illness and Disability
This was generally considered the greatest danger to the human race. It was believed that the mentally inferior, or the “feebleminded” were out-breeding those of higher intelligence and this was degrading the entire gene pool. Carrie Buck, who we will talk about in a bit is relevant in all of these categories. Keep that in mind for later.

19. Methods of “Positive” Eugenics
Anti-miscegenation laws
So, there were two tracks for eugenics. The first track was called “positive eugenics”. This included laws that forbade interracial marriages and relationships for fear of diluting the purity of the race in power (white people).

20. Methods of “Positive” Eugenics
Segregation
Not just in schools and in businesses, but whole communities. People believed that they could contain social problems within the racially segregated neighborhoods, and this would keep any contamination away from the “good stock” that might diminish their ability to have good babies.

21. Methods of “Positive” Eugenics
Strict Immigration policies
This was another form of segregation, aimed in part at the Japanese, but really to limit immigration from eastern European countries. There’s a whole other lecture that could be given on the history of what counts as “white” that would probably fit just as well as this one in a section on purity, but alas.

22. Methods of “Positive” Eugenics
Public Health Programs
Interestingly, even Galton believed that environment had an effect on people’s well-being and ability to be productive members of society. In fact, he coined the phrase Nature vs Nurture, claiming that both held some sway over people, but that genes were the more stubborn of the two. One could clean a house or go to the doctor much more quickly than one could breed better disease resistance into your family.

23. Methods of “Positive” Eugenics
Birth Control and Contraception
Margaret Sanger is a hero of women’s liberation and feminism, and is the founder of Planned Parenthood. She began the Birth Control Review in 1921 and was its editor for a long time. She believed that having too many children was keeping many people locked in poverty and was holding them back from improving their own stock. She was not, however, a racist (at least in the culture of the 1920’s and 30’s). W.E.B. Du Bois, who was a prominent black intellectual at the time served on the board of one of her BC foundations; she worked with black communities to spread her message of birth control, and she received praise from MLK Jr for her work with black communities when he was presented with an award from Planned Parenthood.

24. Methods of “Positive” Eugenics
Encouraging large families for the “eminent.”
In the end, it was considered a numbers game, and the ultimate goal was to out-breed the more degenerate classes of people, be they poor, disabled, criminal whites or those of other races.

25. Methods of “Negative” Eugenics
Anti-miscegenation laws
Segregation
Strict Immigration policies
Whereas positive eugenics was aimed at improving the welfare of people of good stock and upping their birth rates, negative eugenics was aimed at reducing the birthrates of those of degenerate stock. The first three methods I mentioned were tools for both sides of that equation. The final method is the one we most associate with eugenics, however, and that is…

26. Methods of “Negative” Eugenics
Forced Sterilization
No funny picture here, just my cats.

27. It wasn’t about race…
Eugenics wasn’t actually about directly getting rid of so-called “inferior” races. It was mainly about improving one’s own race by getting rid of the less desirable members of that race. If you’ll remember that set of previous slides… the poor, the disabled, the sexually deviant.

28. Except it totally was.
It was believed that if the white race was improved enough and kept pure that the inferior races would naturally go extinct in a Darwinian way.
Robert Bennett Bean, who graduated from Tech in 1900 and went on to run the UVA medical school, which was the center for eugenic science in the United States, published a work called Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain Where he studied 152 brains of black and white individuals, and found that his measurements segregated almost perfectly by race. He concluded that the structural differences in the brains explained the differences in measured intelligence between the races, and that since the differences were structural, no amount of training could overcome it. He also found differences in the structures of male and female brains claiming that these showed the intellectual superiority of men.
Edward M. East, a botanist at Harvard, wrote in his book Inbreeding and Outbreeding, that race mixing would diminish the white race and the “”the negro is inferior to the white.”
Ivey Foreman Lewis, Dean of UVA’s Biology department believed that mixing of the races was an existential threat to the nation. He also praised Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act which forbade any white person from marrying anyone with a trace of black “blood”, one of the more extreme anti-miscegenation laws on the books.

29. Counter-Eugenics
Several African American intellectuals of the time were supporters of Eugenics.
W. E. B. DuBois (the first African American to earn a Doctorate from Harvard) believed that “only fit blacks should procreate to eradicate the race’s heritage of moral iniquity.”
The NAACP promoted eugenics by holding “Better Baby” contests.

30. But, so what, right? After the Nazis and the Neuremberg trials, Eugenics fell out of favor and was abandoned, right? I mean, this was almost 50, 60 years ago since we even tried to do this…

31. Right…?

32. Not so much.
In response to public opinion shifting, the Eugenics movement becomes subsumed within the Birth Control movement and becomes “Population Control.”
In 1965 a study revealed that nearly 35% of women in Puerto Rico had been sterilized as part of a federal program.
Title X, officially known as The Family Planning Act, was signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970 and allowed the use of federal funds for sterilization.
California passed a law that forbade the use of sterilization as a form of birth control in their prisons after an investigative report found that the system had done so coercively to more than 150 women, mostly minorities.
Forced sterilization of the severely disabled is still allowed by many State laws. The courts, who often cite Buck v. Bell as precedent, usually uphold those attempts.

33. Ok, there’s a lot of info on those slides, not much of it particularly pleasant. So, before we get into discussing the film you all watched yesterday and the readings for this week, let’s take a kitten break and see if anyone has any questions.

34. Carrie Buck
Born in Charlottesville Va.

35. Eugenic Legacy
Genes as the ultimate determinate of human ability and behavior.

36. Eugenic Legacy
Genes as the ultimate determinate of human ability and behavior.

37. Eugenic Legacy
Genes as the ultimate determinate of human ability and behavior.

38. Eugenic Legacy
New calls for licensing parents.

39. Eugenic Legacy
New calls for licensing parents.

40. Eugenic Legacy
The Ashley Treatment.

41. Why this matters.
What Bodies Matter. CRISPR, and focus on genes as location for bad behavior. Issues of responsibility. Road to hell and all that.

42. Thank You! Joshua Earle PhD Student in Science and Technology Studies jearle@vt.edu