Control
The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
How did an obscure academic idea pave the way to the Holocaust within just fifty years?
Why does eugenics still loom large in the 21st century, despite its genocidal past?
Did eugenics work? Could it work? Or was it always a pseudoscientific fantasy?
Throughout history, people have sought to reduce suffering, eliminate disease and enhance desirable qualities in their children. In the Victorian era eugenics, a full-blooded attempt to impose control over unruly biology, began to grow among the powerful and quickly spread to dozens of countries around the world. But these ideas are not merely historical: today, with new gene editing techniques, conversations are happening about tinkering with the DNA of our unborn children to make them smarter, fitter, stronger. Deeply steeped in contemporary genetics, CONTROL offers a vital account of one of the defining - and most destructive - ideas of the twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A century of efforts to breed, sterilize, or slaughter the way to grasp control over "who lives" is lambasted in this stinging study of the eugenics movement. Geneticist Rutherford (How to Argue with a Racist) begins by surveying the 20th-century impact of eugenics, the attempt to improve the genetic profile of a population by discouraging certain people—historically the poor, the disabled, and racial minorities—from having children. The doctrine led to thousands of Americans being sterilized under state eugenics laws in the 1930s and, in Nazi Germany, to the mass murder of those deemed genetically "undesirable." These policies, Rutherford shows, grew from a pro-eugenics consensus among leading scientists and other mainstream figures of the time, from Winston Churchill to W.E.B. Du Bois. Rutherford then investigates the neo-eugenics enthusiasm surrounding present-day advances in genetic screening and gene editing, and convincingly debunks the notion of superhuman "designer babies," arguing that it's "barely viable" to enhance complex traits such as intelligence with genetic-engineering technologies. Rutherford writes in a pugnacious, sometimes polemical style—"It persists like a turd that won't flush," he remarks of Madison Grant's perennially influential white-supremacist tome The Passing of the Great Race—while conveying the science in a lucid, down-to-earth way. The result is a stimulating critique of one of science's most disgraceful chapters.
Customer Reviews
Great Book, Insightful, Sobering
An essential read that begins as a horror story of how brutal and misguided humanity can be. The book also covers positive aspects of modern genetics in the treatment of diseases. As a non-scientist I feel much better informed. Some of it is heartbreaking.