ASU Research E-Magazine: Learning From History

Historians say that those who do not learn from the past are doomed to relive it. So, too, in the field of genetics. Those who say that people’s fears regarding the use of genetic information are half-witted need only study the past, says James Strick.

The extreme excesses of the theory known as eugenics is in many ways a cautionary tale for modern geneticists. The early eugenicists were highly educated and generally well-meaning. They had imbibed their Darwin and decided the process of natural selection would improve if it were guided by human intelligence. This theory, which was born in 1883, eventually led the world to genocide in Nazi Germany.

“It’s the excesses of that movement that often causes people to be concerned about the possible abuses of genetic information today,” says Strick, an assistant professor with ASU’s biology and society program.

“The leaders of the eugenics movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were the scientists themselves,” he explains. “They weren’t just passive bystanders who watched in a frustrated way as the information they generated in the laboratories was misused for social and political purposes. They were the leaders of the movement.”

The flaws in the eugenics movement, so obvious to us now, are not likely to be relived. Surely the highly-educated minds of the new millennium could not possibly commit the kind of prejudices and radical excesses that people committed in the past.

However, it is the very confidence that we can avoid past mistakes that could cause us to overlook new ones. And, it is precisely why many people are concerned that genetic information could be misused today and in the future.

“These fears are not based only in people who subscribe to naive beliefs about genetic essentialism,” Strick says. “These fears are also based in people who are clearly opposed to biological determinism—the scientists, who are the most sure that they are immune to those problems. These people learned from the past that genetic essentialism and the excesses that go along with it are always a danger.”

In his own research, Strick explores how modern science interacts with modern society by studying their relationship in the past.

“The very act of overlooking of the matter, because you’re so confident that it won’t be a problem, can sometimes inadvertently lead to the problem.”—Jessica McCann