Daniel J. Kevles

Eugenics and human rights

During the Nazi era in Germany, eugenics prompted the sterilisation of several hundred thousand people then helped lead to antisemitic programmes of euthanasia and ultimately, of course, to the death camps. The association of eugenics with the Nazis is so strong that many people were surprised at the news several years ago that Sweden had sterilised around 60 000 people (mostly women) between the 1930s and 1970s. The intention was to reduce the number of children born with genetic diseases and disorders. After the turn of the century, eugenics movements—including demands for sterilisation of people considered unfit—had, in fact, blossomed in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Scandinavia, not to mention elsewhere in Europe and in parts of Latin America and Asia. Eugenics was not therefore unique to the Nazis. It could, and did, happen everywhere. #### Summary points Although eugenics programmes are usually associated with Nazi Germany, they could, and did, happen everywhere They focused on manipulating heredity or breeding to produce better people and on eliminating those considered biologically inferior In the 1920s and 1930s eugenic sterilisation laws were passed in 24 of the American states, in Canada, and in Sweden Eugenics was criticised increasingly between the wars and was attacked widely when its role in the holocaust was revealed Many people believed that individual human rights mattered far more than those sanctioned by science, law, and social needs Modern eugenics was rooted in the social darwinism of the late 19th century, with all its metaphors of fitness, competition, and rationalisations of inequality. Indeed, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and an accomplished scientist in his own right, coined the word eugenics Galton promoted the ideal of improving the human race by getting rid of the “undesirables” and multiplying the “desirables.” Eugenics began to flourish after the rediscovery, in 1900, …

Ananda Chakrabarty wins a patent: biotechnology, law, and society, 1972-1980.

Article provides scholarly history of one of the seminal cases in the history of intellectual property law and biotechnology, Diamond v Chakrabarty.

Genetics in the United States and Great Britain, 1890-1930: A Review with Speculations

A RICH BODY OF HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP has been published in the last fifteen years about the early history of genetics. Drawing upon the extensive manuscript collections becoming increasingly accessible, this literature has focused on the emergence of the discipline from evolutionary biology and has given provocative attention to the celebrated dispute between the advocates of the thencompeting paradigms of hereditary science-biometry and Mendelism. I The existing historiography nevertheless omits approaches and subjects whose fruitfulness historians of science are increasingly coming to recognize. With some exceptions, the literature of genetics covers its various topics in either the United States or England but not cross-nationally. Moreover, most of the scholarship does not go much beyond treatments of the principal actors or conceptual developments. Certainly it leaves unexplored the history of the overall corps of men and women, including the scientific commoners in research, who came to form the Anglo-American genetics community.2 The literature is scrutinized here with both these deficiencies in mind,

The experimental life sciences in the twentieth century.

Les sciences experimentales de la vie, particulierement la neurobiologie et la virologie, se sont considerablement developpees au XX e siecle, grâce a une meilleure connaissance des techniques et des methodes, et au progres technologiques des instruments

Patents, protections, and privileges : The establishment of intellectual property in animals and plants

Utility patent protection has been granted broadly to living organisms in the United States only in the last quarter century, but in the late nineteenth century, for reasons related to the nationalization of agricultural markets, animal breeders and plant innovators began attempting to devise alternative arrangements to protect intellectual property (IP) in their living products. The arrangements had to take into account both the requirements of IP protection and the various ways the organisms could be reproduced. For animals, prior to patentability, the arrangements involved mainly breed associations and registries. Plant innovators tried to achieve returns from their IP through pricing strategies and trademarks. Finding neither adequate, they began to agitate for legislation that would protect their type of IP, an effort that resulted in the passage of the Plant Patent Act of 1930, the first legislation anywhere to extend a type of patent protection to living products.

The national research fund: A case study in the industrial support of academic science

In 1925 the National Academy of Sciences inaugurated a campaign to raise funds for the support of scientific research in American universities. Organised first as the National Research Endowment, then as the National Research Fund, the promoters of the scheme hoped to obtain the bulk of the money from industrial corporations. Their efforts failed. But the history of the Fund, including the reasons for its failure, provides an instructive case study in the behaviour of business enterprises in the financing of academic research.

From Eugenics to Patents: Genetics, Law, and Human Rights

About a decade ago, President William Clinton said that the next half century will be the age of biology, and, that the engine of that age is genetics. Partly because of the Human Genome Project, scientists have been producing a torrent of information and claims about the role of genes in human disease, capacities, and behaviour. The new knowledge is bringing about a revolution in the diagnosis of diseases and disorders. It is also predicted to yield a powerful arsenal of therapies and cures—and possibly an ability to improve people genetically. According to some, it may also fulfil the longstanding dream of the eugenics movement, which flourished during the first-third or so of the last century. In a number of ways, the eugenics movement trampled on human rights as we understand them. It has no more powerful association than with the Nazis. In Germany during the Hitler years, the eugenics movement prompted the sterilisation of several hundred thousand people and helped lead to antiSemitic programmes of euthanasia and ultimately, of course, to the death camps. But in fact after the turn of the century, eugenics movements, including demands for sterilisation of the unfit, blossomed in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Scandinavia, not to mention elsewhere in Continental Europe and parts of Latin America and Asia. Eugenics was thus not unique to the Nazis. It could—and did—happen everywhere.1

Scientists, the Military, and the Control of Postwar Defense Research: The Case of the Research Board for National Security, 1944-46

At the end of World War II there was considerable controversy in the U.S. government over the postwar relationship between the military and the civilian scientific communities. Defense planners commonly held that the United States had managed to surpass German military technology only because the grace period before Pearl Harbor had allowed the nation sufficient time to mobilize its civilian scientists. They also held, especially after the Germans launched their V-ls and V-2s, that there would be no grace period in the future. In consequence, long before Hiroshima it was widely acknowledged in governmental circles that the maintenance of a strong national defense in the postwar world would require the ongoing participation of civilian scientists and engineers in military research and development. But it was one thing to agree on the necessity of such participation, quite another to reach a politically viable consensus on an essential issue: How was this civilian role to be organized, funded, and controlled? To suggest the way that question was answered, by 1948 the Department of Defense accounted for 62 percent of all federaLresearch and development expenditures, including 60 percent of all federal grants to universities for research outside of agriculture. How and why the military became so significant a patron of postwar academic science deserves more scholarly attention than it has received. To explore the issue of nonnuclear defense research at the end of World War II, one must turn to the dispute, fought out mainly in the executive branch, over the Research Board for National Security.1

The Sciences in America, Circa 1880.

For many years American science in the late 19th century was regarded as an intellectual backwater. This view derived from the assumption that the health of American science at the time was equivalent to the condition of pure science, especially pure physics. However, a closer look reveals that there was considerable vitality in American scientific research, especially in the earth and life sciences. This vitality is explainable in part by the natural scientific resources of the American continent but also in part by the energy given science from religious impulses, social reformism, and practicality. Furthermore, contrary to recent assumptions, the federal government was a significant patron of American science. The portrait of American science circa 1880 advanced in this article suggests that the nations scientific enterprise was characterized by pluralism of institutional support and motive and that such pluralism has historically been the normal mode.

Principles, property rights, and profits: Historical reflections on university/industry tensions

Nowadays, the drive to commercialize the results of university research is widespread. It draws on the market demand for high technology, notably in biotechnology and information technology, and it is energized by the hunger of university administrators for institutional revenues and of. entrepreneurial-minded faculty for the luxuries of the golden ring. The drive, in short, is a joint product of market opportunity and academic desire. This commercialization tends to be a trend of the last 25 years or so. How and why it occurred, and with what implications for the vitality and integrity of academic research, can be illuminated by examining its historical background. The commercialization of academic research, especially through patents, has a long history in the United States. Some of the elements of that history are familiar, but others reveal how much academic culture has changed, not altogether for its own well-being. From early in the twentieth century it was argued that patents on products of academic laboratories might serve the universitys interest by producing income that could be plowed back into laboratories. In 1912, Frederick G. Cottrell, a Berkeley chemist, gave the argument institutional life by forming the Research Corporation, an independent nonprofit organization to manage patents arising from academic research (including a patent that he had obtained on an electrical method of recovering valuable materials from smokestack emissions) and to use the income from them for grants in aid of university research. Yet, the arguments for academic patents also addressed the public interest. Without patent protection, the university would have no control over who devel-