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The abuses of genetics
Oct. 28th, 2007 11:30 amNot been much of a traveller for years. It’s impractical with the children but even before then.
I have been to America. One of the perks of my first job was attendance at a Cold Spring Harbour summer course on fly genetics. It was pretty intensive - they let us out of the lab once to visit New York and do the whole Stevie Wonder “Living for the City” thing, that was cool. The only other touristy diversions were watching horseshoe crabs, seeing robins the size of thrushes and occasional sightings of Nobel prize winners. Barbara McClintock and James Watson were both around.
Watson would have been in his early sixties then but sun and nicotine had already done their work and his face was old as Ayesha’s returned to the flame. Surrounded by acolytes, in a white linen suit and panama hat, I remember describing him as resembling a plantation owner walking the rounds. Given recent events maybe that comparison was quite apt.
For those who haven’t been following the story Watson gave an interview two weeks ago in the Sunday Times as part of the pre-publicity for his new book and associated sell-out tour that included the following paragraph:
He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.
Long a self-styled maverick used to riding the publicity attendant on not being ‘boring' this ended as a gamble lost. The tour was cancelled, Cold Spring Harbour suspended his Chancellorship and on Friday he announced his retirement.
With all the recent LJ discussions about anti-semitism and the Holocaust/Shoah its worth remembering that of the many factors that fed into the rise of Nazism and its Final Solution the then new science of genetics played its part. How misinterpretations of evolution as progress and of natural selection as a moral imperative were used to justify the sterilization and eventually elimination of the ‘unfit’ arbitrarily defined as groups the majority either feared or despised. In the brave new era of genomics the same conflation of social prejudice and actual science is a constant temptation.
I have been to America. One of the perks of my first job was attendance at a Cold Spring Harbour summer course on fly genetics. It was pretty intensive - they let us out of the lab once to visit New York and do the whole Stevie Wonder “Living for the City” thing, that was cool. The only other touristy diversions were watching horseshoe crabs, seeing robins the size of thrushes and occasional sightings of Nobel prize winners. Barbara McClintock and James Watson were both around.
Watson would have been in his early sixties then but sun and nicotine had already done their work and his face was old as Ayesha’s returned to the flame. Surrounded by acolytes, in a white linen suit and panama hat, I remember describing him as resembling a plantation owner walking the rounds. Given recent events maybe that comparison was quite apt.
For those who haven’t been following the story Watson gave an interview two weeks ago in the Sunday Times as part of the pre-publicity for his new book and associated sell-out tour that included the following paragraph:
He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.
Long a self-styled maverick used to riding the publicity attendant on not being ‘boring' this ended as a gamble lost. The tour was cancelled, Cold Spring Harbour suspended his Chancellorship and on Friday he announced his retirement.
With all the recent LJ discussions about anti-semitism and the Holocaust/Shoah its worth remembering that of the many factors that fed into the rise of Nazism and its Final Solution the then new science of genetics played its part. How misinterpretations of evolution as progress and of natural selection as a moral imperative were used to justify the sterilization and eventually elimination of the ‘unfit’ arbitrarily defined as groups the majority either feared or despised. In the brave new era of genomics the same conflation of social prejudice and actual science is a constant temptation.
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