![]() Eugenic presumptions about the differential fitness of native and immigrant populations were central to colonial administrations across the British Empire. From Latin America and Scandinavia to India, China and the Soviet Union, eugenics took root in projects to ‘improve the population’ throughout the twentieth century. These, combined with family planning, became synonymous with modernity and progress. It is particularly associated with the mass-sterilization campaigns that began after Indiana’s 1907 act, and with the Nazi racial-hygiene programme that reached its nadir in the Holocaust.Īnother legacy of the eugenics movement is the management of populations using techniques such as demography, racial classification and statistical modelling. Credit: Will Latham/eyevineĮugenics, never without its trenchant opponents, became an increasingly crucial part of a new world order over the course of the twentieth century. And as confident experimentation turned ever more closely and deliberately towards humans, the relationships between research, industry and governments became a tangled ethical bank, and have remained so ever since.Įmbryologist Ian Wilmut encounters his brainchild Dolly the cloned sheep, which is now stuffed and went on show at an exhibition in 2015. In fact, this view of life was born at least a century earlier. Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created Dolly the cloned sheep in the 1990s (at the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, UK), once stated that it was Dolly’s birth that ushered in “the age of biological control” - and made obsolete the expression “biologically impossible” 4. That same decade, in the United States, physiologist Jacques Loeb pursued a new ‘engineering biology’, trying out all sort of chemicals and conditions to prompt development in model organisms such as sea urchins 3. Using one of his infant daughter’s fine, elastic hairs, he tied a loop around a fertilized salamander egg to create an animal with two heads and one tail. In 1903, the embryologist Hans Spemann conducted his famous experiments with amphibians. Rather than simply observing life, experimenters began to manipulate its component parts to test the limits of the system, mix up ingredients and turn biology inside out.ġ50 years of Nature - an anniversary collection Biology rebootedīy the early part of the twentieth century, what had come to dominate was “the biological gaze”, to quote historian Evelyn Fox Keller at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge 2. His methods typified a new era of disrupt-and-learn biology. ![]() To probe the formative effects of gestation on heredity in mammals, the gentleman naturalist Walter Heap, a laboratory demonstrator at the University of Cambridge, UK, conducted the first experiments in transferring embryos from one variety of rabbit to another at his home in Prestwich in the 1890s. With Darwin’s bold hypotheses set before them, Victorian breeders, microscopists, collectors, astronomers, geologists and anatomists sought to discover the laws interconnecting life’s core processes - often by using ingenious experimental designs. In the late nineteenth century, like today, society was in upheaval and science was on a roll. To work out how to move forward, it is worth looking at how we got here. The difference is that many of the issues, such as the remodelling of future generations or the surveillance of personal data, have become as everyday as they are vast in their implications. That there has never been a border between ethics and biology remains as apparent today as it was 150 years ago. And, as older quandaries die out, they are replaced by more vigorous descendants. The ethical dilemmas engendered by these two late-nineteenth-century visions of biological control proliferate still. Later, he coined the term ‘eugenics’ to advocate selective reproduction through application of the breeder’s guiding hand.ĭarwin’s transformative theory inspired modern biology Galton’s attempt to equate selection and social reform spawned eugenics. Galton argued that human abilities were differentially inherited, and introduced a statistical methodology to aid “improvement of the race”. That same year, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton published Hereditary Genius, a book that recast natural selection as a question of social planning 1. As he finished chapters, Darwin sent them to his daughter, Henrietta, to edit - hoping she could help to head off the hostile responses to his debut, including objections to the implication that morality and ethics could have no basis in nature, because nature had no purpose. In the autumn of 1869, Charles Darwin was hard at work revising the fifth edition of On The Origin of Species and drafting his next book, The Descent of Man, to be published in 1871.
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