Watson as wake-up call: When genetics endorses a new eugenics
The world now knows about the blatant racism of the twentieth century's most famous geneticist. Those tracking the story have also learned of James Watson's other assorted bigotries - his denigration of "ugly girls," "stupid" children, and "fat people"; his endorsement of paying rich people to have more children and aborting affected fetuses when tests for a "gay gene" are developed.
But that's not all. Though neither media nor blogosphere have noted it so far, Watson - and a small but disturbing number of other prominent figures - have over the past decade been actively promoting a renewed program of eugenics, this time using twenty-first century reproductive and genetic technologies.
The new eugenics crowd is hardly coy. Various among them have explicitly endorsed "seizing control of our [human] evolutionary future" and "engineering the human germline." Back in 1998 they held a high-profile conference - covered on the front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post - to plan how to make this high-tech eugenics "acceptable" to the American public.
At that event, Watson called for "mak[ing] better human beings" by "add[ing] genes." A few years later, he advised that "Hitler's use of the term Master Race" should not make us "feel the need to say that we never want to use genetics to make humans more capable than they are today."
Those familiar with the Center for Genetics and Society are aware of these travesties; in fact, CGS's formation in 2001 was prompted in large part by the urgent need to counter them. Thus we've collected a fair sample of revealing Watsonisms. We've compiled these, and ask that anyone who has others send them to us.
Here are a few other accounts of Watson's eugenics advocacy:
- "Watson's World," Science, Susan Lindee, April 18, 2003
- "James Watson Wants to Build a Better Human,"AlterNet.org, Ralph Brave, May 28, 2003
- "Germline Warfare,"The Nation, Ralph Brave, April 7, 2003