Matt Ridley

growing influence of environmental explanations of human nature promulgated by people like Margaret Mead and the behaviourists in psychology. The Labour party was now firmly against eugenics, which it saw as a form of class war on the working class. The opposition of the Catholic Church was also influential in some quarters.9

Surprisingly, it was not until 1938 that reports filtered through from Germany of what compulsory sterilisation meant in practice.

The Brock committee had been unwise enough to praise the Nazi sterilisation law, which came into force in January 1934. It was now clear that this law was an intolerable infringement of personal liberty and an excuse for persecution. In Britain, good sense prevailed.10

This brief history of eugenics leads me to one firm conclusion.

What is wrong with eugenics is not the science, but the coercion.

Eugenics is like any other programme that puts the social benefit before the individual's rights. It is a humanitarian, not a scientific crime. There is little doubt that eugenic breeding would 'work' for human beings just as it works for dogs and dairy cattle. It would be possible to reduce the incidence of many mental disorders and improve the health of the population by selective breeding. But there is also little doubt that it could only be done very slowly at a gigantic cost in cruelty, injustice and oppression. Karl Pearson once said, in answer to Wedgwood: 'What is social is right, and there is no definition of right beyond that.' That dreadful statement should be the epitaph of eugenics.

Yet, as we read in our newspapers of genes for intelligence, of germline gene therapy, of prenatal diagnosis and screening, we can-298 G E N O M E

not but feel in our bones that eugenics is not dead. As I argued in the chapter on chromosome 6, Galton's conviction that much of human nature has a hereditary element is back in fashion, this time with better — though not conclusive — empirical evidence. Increasingly, today, genetic screening allows parents to choose the genes of their children. The philosopher Philip Kitcher, for instance, calls genetic screening 'laissez-faire eugenics': 'Everyone is to be his (or her) own eugenicist, taking advantage of the available genetic tests to make the reproductive decisions she (he) thinks correct.'11

By this standard, eugenics happens every day in hospitals all over the world and by far its most common victims are embryos equipped with an extra chromosome 21, who would otherwise be born with Down syndrome. In most cases, had they been born, they would have led short, but largely happy lives — that is the nature of their disposition. In most cases, had they been born, they would have been loved by parents and siblings. But for a dependent, non-sentient embryo, not being born is not necessarily the same as being killed.

We are back, in short order, to the debate on abortion and whether the mother has the right to abort a child, or the state the right to stop her: an old debate. Genetic knowledge gives her more reasons for wanting an abortion. The possibility of choosing among embryos for special ability, rather than against lack of ability, may not be too far away. Choosing boys and aborting girls is already a rampant abuse of amniocentesis in the Indian subcontinent in particular.

Have we rejected government eugenics merely to fall into the trap of allowing private eugenics? Parents may come under all sorts of pressures to adopt voluntary eugenics, from doctors, from health-insurance companies and from the culture at large. Stories abound of women as late as the 1970s being cajoled by their doctors into sterilisation because they carried a gene for a genetic disease. Yet if government were to ban genetic screening on the grounds that it might be abused, it would risk increasing the load of suffering in the world: it would be just as cruel to outlaw screening as to make it compulsory. It is an individual decision, not one that can be left to technocrats. Kitcher certainly thinks so: 'As for the traits that E U G E N I C S 2 9 9

people attempt to promote or avoid, that is surely their own business.' So does James Watson: 'These things should be kept away from people who think they know b e s t . . . I am trying to see genetic decisions put in the hand of users, which governments aren't.'12

Although there are still a few fringe scientists worried about the genetic deterioration of races and populations,13 most scientists now recognise that the well-being of individuals should take priority over that of groups. There is a world of difference between genetic screening and what the eugenists wanted in their heyday — and it lies in this: genetic screening is about giving private individuals private choices on private criteria. Eugenics was about nationalising that decision to make people breed not for themselves but for the state. It is a distinction frequently overlooked in the rush to define what 'we' must allow in the new genetic world. Who is 'we'? We as individuals, or we as the collective interest of the state or the race?

Compare two modern examples of 'eugenics' as actually practised today. In the United States, as I discussed in the chapter on chromosome 13, the Committee for the Prevention of Jewish Genetic Disease tests schoolchildren's blood and advises against later marriages in which both parties carry the same disease-causing version of a particular gene. This is an entirely voluntary policy. Although it has been criticised as eugenic, there is no coercion involved at all.14

The other example comes from China, where the government continues to sterilise and abort on eugenic grounds. Chen Mingzhang, minister of public health, recently expostulated that births of inferior quality are serious among 'the old revolutionary base, ethnic minorities, the frontier, and economically poor areas'. The Maternal and Infant Health Care Law, which came into effect only in 1994, makes premarital check-ups compulsory and gives to doctors, not parents, the decision to abort a child. Nearly ninety per cent of Chinese geneticists approve of this compared with five per cent of American geneticists; by contrast eighty-five per cent of the American geneticists think an abortion decision should be made by the woman, compared with forty-four per cent of the Chinese. As 3 0 0 G E N O M E

Xin Mao, who conducted the Chinese part of this poll, put it, echoing Karl Pearson: 'The Chinese culture is quite different, and things are focused on the good of society, not the good of the individual.'15

Many modern accounts of the history of eugenics present it as an example of the dangers of letting science, genetics especially, out of control. It is much more an example of the danger of letting government out of control.

C H R O M O S O M E 2 2

F r e e W i l l

Hume's fork: Either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them.

Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy

As this book is being completed, a few months before the end of a millennium, there comes news of a momentous announcement. At the Sanger Centre, near Cambridge - the laboratory which leads the world in reading the human genome - the complete sequence of chromosome 22 is finished. All 15.5 million 'words' (or so - the exact length depends on the repeat sequences, which vary greatly) in the twenty-second chapter of the human