Backdoor to Eugenics

Troy Duster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135935634
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Considered a classic in the field, Troy Duster's Backdoor to Eugenics was a groundbreaking book that grappled with the social and political implications of the new genetic technologies. Completely updated and revised, this work will be welcomed back into print as we struggle to understand the pros and cons of prenatal detection of birth defects; gene therapies; growth hormones; and substitute genetic answers to problems linked with such groups as Jews, Scandanavians, Native American, Arabs and African Americans. Duster's book has never been more timely.

1 Inherited Genetic Disorders and Inherited Social Orders

In the fifteenth-century Spain of Torquemada, people routinely raised the question about the biological differences between believers and heretics, between Christians and Jews, posited the natural superiority of one group over the other, and invoked the known procedures for coming to terms with the available knowledge. Just before and during the Inquisition, the most important biological argument for the persecution of the Jews centered around the concept limpiezza de sangre or purity of the blood (Lea, 1906). Limpiezza decrees were used to prohibit intermarriage and, quite significantly, required that a candidate for a particular ecclesiastical or secular post prove his Christian ancestry (Coulton, 1938).¹

Efforts to attribute human traits or behaviors to the influence of biological inheritance are seemingly limitless: they have focused on such widely diverging matters as eye color, blood type, poverty, fingerprints, heretical beliefs, aggression, intelligence, unemployment, birth disorders, mental illness, skin color, rape, ethnic purity, and musical ability, with varying degrees of success. The first question that comes to mind is: What is the level of truth of each claim of hereditary basis? While blood types and skin color can now be shown to be hereditary, the conventional wisdom in the contemporary West is that heretical beliefs and unemployment are not biologically inherited. While there is currently wide agreement as to the biological basis of many birth defects, there is no consensus in the scientific world about whether the “genetic account” is appropriate for many traits, behaviors, and disorders. Contemporary science is fairly well equipped to assess any particular truth claim.

There is an equally important question, however, which receives comparatively little attention: Why, in any given society, do studies of heritability focus upon trait A versus B or behavior C versus D? Once the credibility of the truth claim is bracketed, it is possible to see how a sociology of knowledge provides some answers, however tentative, that are directly related to consequences that ensue with the formation of organizational developments and institutional machineries.

Heritability as the Recurring “Sirens’ Call”

Despite alternating periods of attraction and wariness, the relationship between genetics and society has been passionate for a full century; beginning with an early absorbing mutual interest (1900–1935), surviving an abrupt disenchantment and apparent divorce (1940–1965), and now on through a resurgent warming trend (1970–1990). The “prism of heritability” ² is very seductive. Even when the genetic explanation for some arena of human life has been discredited or fallen from favor, the appeal of such accounts somehow remains just beneath the surface.

There is no easy or simple explanation for this. One must look at more than the discoveries and refutations in a field of inquiry to explain the spread of ideas. It is by now almost a truism that science both shapes and is shaped by social, economic, and political conditions (Harding, 1986; Knorr-Cetina and Mulkay, 1983; Keller, 1982, 1984; Zuckerman, 1977; Knorr-Cetina, 1981; Merton, 1973). The science of genetics and the society in which it is located are in a special kind of tension. Even after lying dormant for a time, in a period of rapid transformation, the appeal of a biological destiny can be irresistible (Pickens, 1968). The shifting status of the explanatory power of race is an example. At certain points, race is invoked to explain social status, as with slavery in nineteenthcentury America. A combination of Nazi atrocities and social science research converged in the mid-twentieth century to undermine the explanatory power of race (in its biological status) as either a popular ³ or a scientific accounting for human behavior.

Then, just at the point in the intellectual history of the West when “race” was getting to be treated in both scientific and enlightened lay quarters as something no more than skin-deep, just when the social sciences thought they had won the battle with hereditarians over the fundamentally arbitrary importance of race ⁴ in society, a new development came along to shake this assumption at its core: the growth of a body of research showing that genetic disorders were distributed differently through different racial and ethnic groups. Jews, African Americans, Asians, North Europeans, etc., are at different risks for genetic disorders. This was no longer a matter of social science theorizing about the significance or insignificance of race for social position. Now there was empirical evidence that one group was more likely to have a genetic disorder than another. Even though socially enforced patterns of mating had produced this development, the new technology would give race and ethnic categorization a potential for a different and independent reality.

This new impetus created a body of research and the related genetic screening programs that would emerge as cost-effective only if greatestrisk populations ⁵ were identified. This radically altered the discourse about race and rearranged the landscape between the social and natural sciences on this topic. The importance of race and ethnicity in cultural history has refueled the old logic to give rise to a new question: If genetic disorders are differentially distributed by race and ethnicity, why aren’t other human traits and characteristics?

Popular accounts in the mass media of the new technology in molecular biology and genetics emphasize such matters as frozen embryos, testtube babies, baboon heart implants in humans, and the prospective cures for cancer and diabetes with recombined DNA. Moreover, scholarly journals and literary monthlies publish lengthy and frequent debates by scientists, ethicists, theologians, and politicians on the real and imagined prospects and deeper meanings of these developments.⁶ We are a long way from the kind of genetic manipulation that would permit a dash of blond hair or Olympic gymnastic potential here, a gene splice for some genius there, or a snippit of strand X to intercept schizophrenia and heart disease. Nevertheless, the considerable attention given to highly selective developments affecting only the tiniest fraction of the population has diverted our attention away from real and significant developments that already engulf us ⁷ I would point to two major issues.

First, genetic screening programs, already in place throughout most of the United States, can be distinguished from all previous health screening in the degree to which “risk-populations” to be identified have frequently been linked to ethnicity and race. In sharp contrast to mass health screening for contagious diseases, these programs cannot be made as appealing to all groups in behalf of the common good. Yet, mandatory newborn screening is already underway for a sizeable proportion of the population, and prenatal diagnosis of several hundred genetic disorders is now possible.

Second, state and national registries for information received from newborn genetic screening programs are already in place, collecting data in the chromosome and genetic trait status of millions of infants. These data are collected for health and medical reasons, and often deal with whole populations, not just those at greatest risk. Such information, recorded and stored in archives for both immediate and long-range retrieval, may prove useful to health professionals who dedicate much of their time and lives as counselors and treatment specialists trying to improve the condition of those with birth disorders. But these registries, now in their beginning stages, are part of the machinery in place (organizational, institutional, legal, and physical) which will slowly, subtly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, help shift the refraction of human traits, characteristics, behaviors, disorders, and defects through a “genetic prism.” ⁸

In the midst of these developments, the United States is undergoing its second great economic and political transformation. At the turn of the century, the country changed from an agrarian to an urban industrial society. The urban areas of the emerging industrial sectors of the North-east and Midwest were mainly white, with ethnic diversity largely imported from Europe.⁹ During this first great transformation, genetic explanations played an important role in providing an “understanding” of rapid changes and a measure of legitimacy to public policies to “correct” the problem (Kamin, 1974; Ludmerer, 1972; Haller, 1963; Kevles, 1985; Pickens, 1968).¹⁰ The last decades of the century are the locus of the second great economic transformation. The shift to a service economy has brought about dramatic social dislocations, much of it centering around racial and ethnic differentiation.¹¹ It is impossible to document a shift in the zeitgeist, but there is a sense in which a new “genetic under-standing” of the conditions we live in is penetrating the popular discourse.¹² As we shall soon see, of the various strands to the field of genetics, it is molecular genetics which has been mainly responsible for the new technological developments. The older strands of population genetics and the search for Mendelian laws of inheritance have always had amateur as well as professional and scientific research spinning off to impute the genetics of many different phenomena regarded as social problems.

Currently, only a very small part of the population is using the new technologies of prenatal detection, which, along with postnatal interventions and the promises of human gene therapies, now have the potential for reducing human suffering.¹³ At the same time, a genetic screen is a genetic screen. Although not generally available, prenatal diagnosis is possible before the end of the first third of a pregnancy.¹⁴ Screening for a defective fetus where there is near universal consensus about the seriousness of the defect is one thing. When there is high variability in the clinical expression of a genetic disorder, ¹⁵ a host of new issues surfaces. When there is disagreement about the very nature of whether a “defect” is a defect or an arbitrary social assessment of aesthetics and or potential dependency, the issue then shifts away from the advisability of medical intervention strategies for health purposes to the question of who should decide.

As noted above, however, the more immediate concern that already affects the lives of millions of people is the development of the earliest stages of genetic screening and its overlap with existing social groups. Table 1.1 summarizes some of the research of the last several decades documenting the ethnic distribution of genetic disorders. ¹⁶

These tables on the ethnic distribution of disorder ¹⁸ are consequential. This knowledge, even as imprecisely constituted, can and does become the foundation upon which the social organization of real genetic screen ing programs develop, and also provides the guideposts to gene therapy research. Gene screening programs feed data back into a growing scientific data base, and buttress select arguments of the scientific structure because there are data on that topic. The order and manner in which those discoveries are made, who makes them, and the sense that is made of it all should be at the core of research on the social organization of knowledge. In this chapter, I will try to show that certain genetic and biological explanations of heritability can be traced directly to prevailing social concerns.

Table 1.1 Selected High Incidence of Genetic Disorders

Table 1.2 Ethnicities/Groups Primarily Affected by Disorders (USA) Ethnicities Primarily Affected

Genetics: Multifaceted, but Converging Questions around “Target” Populations

The field of genetics is broad and encompasses different types of research and analysis, including population genetics, Mendelian genetics, and molecular genetics. Population geneticists tend to work primarily with large population statistics. The original goal of the field was to unlock the key to Darwinian evolution by applying statistical methods.¹⁹ Were there patterns that showed up in a population by chance or by pattern, and how much of that could be attributed to genes? This strategy and the new discipline that emerged around it ²⁰ gained their strongest foothold in Britain and on the European continent. Perhaps one reason is that the relative ethnic homogeneity of the populations there meant that a concerted search for differences in intelligence would focus upon class differences. One of the central tasks of any social order is to convince its members that the current system of social stratification is legitimate. Gould (1981) demonstrates how scientists in the nineteenth century purposefully and determinedly aimed to show how the higher classes ascended by natural biological superiority.

The word population has a specific and technical meaning for the geneticist. At the broadest level, it is any interbreeding aggregate—thus, a species. But species have subpopulations that interbreed only among themselves. In humans, customs, laws, traditions, geography, ethnicity, klan, etc., work as barriers to interbreeding for the whole human race. Anthropologists and sociologists chronicle hundreds of differing forms of laws of endogamy and exogamy, incest taboos and arranged marriages. States have created and enforced inheritance entitlements based upon professed beliefs and professed heresies. All this variation in human interbreeding has produced both observable patterns and variations in the species. In evolutionary theory, the idea of the survival of the fittest generated the intellectual and political interests of population geneticists, many of whom were trying to find an evolutionary tree within homo sapiens. Here we come to the intellectual birth of population genetics, and the basic relationship to the matter of what is being looked for:

A preliminary step in analyzing the genetics of a population, then, is to measure allele frequency…. Theoretically, it is very simple to measure allele frequencies: one simply looks at a population [italics mine], assumes that each person is just one cell (perhaps the zygote from which he developed), and counts how many alleles of each kind there are for any particular locus. (Suzuki and Griffith, 1976:405)

Theoretically simple, and practically possible for blood groups, where one can count and measure allele ²¹ frequencies. But population geneticists, beginning with Pearson, ²² were looking for signs of something called “human intelligence,” for which there is no known allele. They were looking for something that would help explain the social evolution of select subpopulations to the top of the social and economic order.²³ The target population of the early population geneticists, then, coincided with smaller, socially configured subpopulations with a social marking.

A very different wing of genetics was fathered by the Augustinian monk Gregor Mendel in the 1860s. Rather than statistical analysis of traits and characteristics in a large population, Mendel and his followers searched for evidence of the appearance of traits in offspring that followed “laws of inheritance” (e.g., Mendel’s account of transmission through dominant and recessive genes). After laying dormant for many decades, Mendelian genetics was rediscovered in the early part of the twentieth century.

By studying garden peas, without ever seeing a cell, Mendel was able to deduce that certain genes were dominant, others recessive. In crossing purple- and white-flowering plants, the first generation all turned out purple; then

he planted 929 peas…some grew up to be white-flowered. The white character had reappeared. He then did something that, more than anything else, marks the birth of genetics: he counted how many there were of each kind…the key to the future of genetics. There were 705 purple plants, and 224 white ones. He observed that this was close to a 3:1 ratio (Suzuki and Griffiths, 1976:8).

The significance of the notion of dominant and recessive genes was profound. It meant that a single gene could account for some trait. Those who followed the Mendelian tradition could search through families for evidence of these Mendelian genes. While many genes do not follow such Mendelian principles, it is important at the early juncture to understand Mendel’s orientation to the research problem in order to see the direction Mendelian genetics would take in the search for human genetic principles.

Mendelian genetics gained most of its followers in the United States. I noted above that population genetics was more popular in England, and suggested that relative ethnic homogeneity may have played an important role in the search for class differences in, for example, intelli gence. The United States was a country of immigrants from a wide variety of nations, mainly European. Notions of “race” and “ethnicity” frequently converged in the nineteenth century, and people spoke freely of the Nordic race or t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword: Advocating a “Genethics”
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Backdoor to Eugenics
• 1 Inherited Genetic Disorders and Inherited Social Orders
• 2 The Prism of Heritability and The Sociology of Knowledge: What Questions?Whose Questions?
• 3 The Genetic Screening of “Target” Populations
• 4 Dilemmas of a “General” Genetic Disorder Control Policy
• 5 Neutrality and Ideology in Genetic Disorder Control
• 6 The Increasing Appropriation of Genetic Explanations
• 7 Eugenics by the Back Door
• 8 Human Genetics, Evolutionary Theory, and Social Stratification
• Afterword: The New and Emerging Relationship between Behavioral and Molecular Genetics
• Appendix A Intermediate Steps Between Micro and Macro Integration: The Case of Screening for Inherited Disorders
• Appendix B Screening Issues in Counseling
• Appendix C The Ethnic Distribution of Disease
• Notes
• References