'Eugenics' are exactly what the Nazis believed
in THE scientist who discovered DNA is talking about a genetic
cure for 'stupidity'.
James Watson, who won a Nobel Prize with Francis Crick and
Maurice Wilkins for their revelation in 1953 that twisted
threads of acid in the human body carried all the programming
which determines our physical make-up, says low intelligence
is a genetic disorder.
Molecular biologists have a duty to develop
gene therapies or screening tests to identify unborn children
who don't have the potential for high IQs, believes the 75-year-old
American, who is now president of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
in New York.
(Here's another twist in the helix: who knows,
nowadays, that the New Zealand biophysicist Maurice Hugh Frederick
Wilkins, now 85, was the third man in that Nobel-winning team?
Everyone has heard of Crick and Watson - what happened to
Wilkins? How did he let the other two steal his glory? Was
he stupid or something?)
''If you are really stupid,'' Watson says in
a TV programme called simply DNA, to be shown on Channel 4
on Sunday, ''I would call that a disease.
''The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty,
even in elementary school, what's the cause of it?
''A lot of people would like to say, 'Well,
poverty, things like that'. It probably isn't. So I'd like
to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent.''
That's a good word, 'help'. It sounds positive,
humanitarian, altruistic. But despite the completion of the
human genome project last year, which listed all the three
thousand million instructions in our genetic programmes, we
still have no idea what almost all of those instructions do.
Many of them probably do nothing at all. And
even when we do know what one byte of the code controls, we
have no means of reaching into the DNA and rearranging it.
Watson's notion of identifying and 'helping'
children of low IQ before they are even born is a spurious
nonsense.
The only ambition science could possible achieve
in this area would be to pick out foetuses which are at higher
than average risk of 'stupidity' - perhaps where there is
a family history of learning difficulties, for instance. And
the only way to 'help' them would be to abort them.
It is not a new idea. Many scientists and intellectuals
across Europe supported 'eugenics', which means 'good genes'.
Marie Stopes, the pioneer of birth control,
believed utopia could be achieved within decades by ensuring
unsuitable people did not breed: ''I would legislate compulsory
sterilisation of the insane, feeble-minded, revolutionaries
and half castes,'' she wrote in 1920.
Polite society was obliged to forget about eugenics,
when the Nazis took the theory to its logical limit and began
a systematic programe of wiping out all 'inferior races',
all 'perverted sexualities' and all 'stupidity' - the Jews,
of course, and also blacks, Romanies, homosexuals, Communists
and children with learning difficulties.
The Holocaust was eugenics in action. And eugenics
in action is exactly what James Watson is talking about. I
am tempted to launch into a rant about the stupidity of anyone
who thinks children must be condemned to a life of failure
and menial labour if they cannot pass the government's arbitrary
reading and maths tests at the age of seven.
I could rage about how many of our most brilliant
minds were slow starters at lessons - Churchill, who could
barely write his name on his school entrance exam; Einstein,
who could not talk properly before he was nine; Paul Erdos,
the great mathematician, whose mother had to tie his shoelaces
until he was in his teens.
James Watson would have had all those great
minds destroyed before they were ever born. The real point,
though, is not about what children might become, as they turn
their difficulties into opportunities - it is about the marvel
of who they are right now.
I meet many kids with every kind of problem
- children with cancer, children with Aids, children with
cerebral palsy and children with severe learning difficulties.
It doesn't matter whether the body or the intellect
is impaired: the spirit is what inspires us. And every human
child, even in the harshest adversity, is bursting with spirit.
James Watson's supporters make excuses for him.
They say he is mischievous, that he likes to whip up controversy,
that he says things just to get a reaction.
People used to make the same excuses for Bernard
Manning, until his remarks about Jews and blacks began to
offend so many people that the media was forced to ignore
him.
People like Watson are going to be spouting
a lot about eugenics as the results of the genome project
are unravelled. They will call it by some other name - human
genetic modification, perhaps - but there is no doubt of what
they mean.
It will not be enough to wince or smile with
embarrassment when we hear friends and neighbours and colleagues
echoing this wicked rubbish.
We have to speak out. We have to say, ''You're
talking bigoted trash. Think about what you're saying. The
last time people believed in 'making the human race stronger'
and 'wiping out genetic flaws', we ended up with Auschwitz
and Treblinka.
''Is that what you believe in? Is that what
you want?''
Is that what James Watson wants? Is that his
ambition for the future of genetics? He is a very stupid man.
Email
him at urigeller@compuserve.com
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