Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening by Ruth Schwartz Cowan

By Ruth Schwartz Cowan

The secrets and techniques locked in our genes are being published, and we discover ourselves either enthused and anxious approximately what that portends. we glance ahead to curing disorder and assuaging suffering—for our kids in addition to for ourselves—but we additionally fear approximately delving too deeply into the double helix. Abuses perpetrated via eugenicists—from involuntary sterilization to murder—continue to taint our emotions approximately genetic screening. but, as Ruth Schwartz Cowan unearths, sleek genetic screening has been practiced on account that 1960, reaping benefits thousands of girls and kids around the globe. She persuasively argues that new varieties of screening—prenatal, baby, and provider testing—are either morally correct and politically appropriate. scientific genetics, equipped at the hope of oldsters and physicians to minimize agony and elevate own freedom, no longer at the wish to “improve the human race,” is actually a wholly assorted company from eugenics. Cowan’s narrative strikes from an account of the interwoven histories of genetics and eugenics within the first half the 20 th century, to the advance of recent sorts of genetic screening after mid-century. It contains illuminating chapters at the frequently misunderstood checking out courses for sickle telephone anemia, and at the world’s simply mandated premarital screening courses, either one of them at the island of Cyprus. Neither minimizing the trouble of the alternatives that glossy genetics has created for us nor fearing them, Cowan bravely and compassionately argues that we will enhance the standard of our personal lives and the lives of our kids by utilizing the fashionable technology and expertise of genetic screening responsibly. (20080522)

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After the creation of an organized eugenics movement, these arguments gained both currency and strength because the eugenicists were able to argue that the phenomenon had a biological basis. Harry H. Laughlin, who was second in command at the Eugenics Record Office, became the star witness when the United States Congress considered what would eventually become the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, the law that virtually closed the door to immigrants who were not Protestants from northern Europe.

Bernard argued that the body was a chemical system, and that diseases could not be properly treated until their underlying chemical causes were understood. Alfred Garrod took up Bernard’s challenge; through careful, quantitative biochemical studies, he discovered that patients with gout had increased concentrations of uric acid in their blood, a crucial discovery that made him a medical celebrity. Young Archibald was determined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Within months after finishing his medical studies, he was already publishing the results of his research: first, very simple reports of interesting medical cases; then, in 1892, his first venture into chemistry, analyses of the chemical changes in the blood of patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Hermann J. Muller, the American geneticist who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that radiation increases the frequency of mutation, was an outspoken socialist and eugenicist. In the late 1920s Muller ran into trouble with the trustees of the University of Texas, where he was then teaching, because he refused to recant his radical views. By 1933 he had fled to the Soviet Union to become the director of the genetics laboratory of the Leningrad Institute of Applied Botany. J. B. S. Haldane, the prominent British biologist, was a Marxist who criticized British proponents of involuntary sterilization as being both inadequately eugenic (because sterilization would not actually have the eugenic result they predicted) and classist 26 • HEREDITY AND HOPE (because they assumed that the middle class was more fit than the working class).

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