The scientist and author Dr Adam Rutherford looks at how the study of genetics has been warped for political ends
t’s a quirk of history that the foundations of modern biology – and as a consequence, some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century – should rely so heavily on peas. Cast your mind back to school biology, and Gregor Mendel, whose 200th birthday we mark next month. Though Mendel is invariably described as a friar, his formidable legacy is not in Augustinian theology, but in the mainstream science of genetics.
But there’s a lesser-known story that shaped the course of the 20th century in a different way. The origins of genetics are inextricably wedded to eugenics. Since Plato suggested the pairing of “high-quality” parents, and Plutarch described Spartan infanticide, the principles of population control have been in place, probably in all cultures.
American eugenics was faithfully married to Mendel’s laws – though Mendel himself had nothing to do with these policies. Led by Charles Davenport – a biologist and Galton devotee – the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, set out in 1910 to promote a racist, ableist ideology, and to harvest the pedigrees of Americans. With this data, Davenport figured, they could establish the inheritance of traits both desirable and defective, and thus purify the American people.
, he traced a perfect pattern of Mendelian inheritance for traits good and bad. The legitimate family was eminently successful, whereas his bastard progeny produced a clan of criminals and disabled “defectives”, eventually concluding with Deborah. With this, Goddard concluded that the feeble-mindedness of the Kallikaks was encoded in a gene, a single unit of defective inheritance passed down from generation to generation, just like in Mendel’s peas.
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