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1996 UCL Jurisprudence Rev. 116 (1996)
Eugenics: Old Ideas, New Tools

handle is hein.journals/ucljurev3 and id is 128 raw text is: UCL Jurisprudence Review Eugenics: Old Ideas, New Tools Juliette S. E. Quashie Of new experimentation with man medicine is surely the most legitimate; psychological the most dubious; biological the most dangerous. Hans Jonas. I. Galton Revisited What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly man may do providently, quickly and kindly. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction; just as it is his duty to succour his neighbours who suffer misfortune. The improvement of our stock seems to me one of the highest objects that we can reasonably attempt. We are ignorant of the ultimate destines of humanity, but feel perfectly sure that it is a noble a work to raise the level in the sense already explained, as it would be disgraceful to abase it. I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind Sir Francis Galton. University College London has, as one of it's many distinctions, inherited the legacy of Sir Francis Galton. A noted genius of the Victorian age, Sir Francis Galton has been credited as the founder of both statistics and human genetics. The Galton Laboratory is the lineal descendent of the Anthropometric Laboratory set up by Sir Francis Galton at the International Health Exhibition of 1884, part of the Eugenics Record Office also started by him, and the Biometric Laboratory, each founded at University College in 1904. Since then it has maintained an unbroken association with UCL, and now contains within itself the academic staff of UCL's Department of Genetics and Biometry. Yet it is for coining the term 'eugenics' and the negative connotations2 surrounding the term that Sir Galton is most well known. In spite of his many achievements, Sir Francis Galton and his ideology might have been relegated to footnotes of history; however Galton's eugenics have found new life via the Human Genome Project (HGP). The Human Genome Project or Human Genome Initiative (HGI) and research surrounding it are the new tools for the old idea of breeding a better human race. Amniocentesis, health screening and genetic counselling are changing the whole 'beginning of life' process. Consequent upon the mapping of human genes many women are choosing whether or not to get pregnant, once pregnant whether or not to abort the foetus. The time is also nearing when not only 'sex selection' becomes a viable option in pregnancy but one may also be able to choose the physical and mental Milo Keynes, Sir Francis Galton, FRS (London: Macmillan Press. Ltd, 1993) p. 194. It is perhaps just as well that Sir Galton did not witness the portrayal of his ideas under Nazism. He could never have envisaged that his reputation would become so damaged by the misapplication of eugenics, as for instance in the 1930's by the Nazis in Germany when they encouraged 'positive eugenics', with Hitler's cabinet promulgating a eugenic sterilisation law, so that the term eugenics' took on ugly connotations such as 'genocide' and what is now called 'racism'. Ibid., p. 24 116

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