Science, technology, and the environment - Population and healing - From eugenics to genetics

3 important questions on Science, technology, and the environment - Population and healing - From eugenics to genetics

Where were eugenics popular? What did eugenics not consider?

  • Eugenics means "good in birth." Eugenics was particularly popular among middle-class professionals who saw it as a solution to urban degradation, crime, poverty, and disease.
  • Convinced that humans were determined in large measure by their inherited "germ plasm," eugenicists discounted the role of environment in shaping basic character and advocated on behalf of public policies that would reduce the fertility rates of those groups deemed to be biologically inferior.

Who continued to embrace eugenics in the postwar environment?

In the postwar environment, those few who continued to embrace eugenics worked under the disturbing shadow of the Holocaust.

What social and ethical implications were debated about the DNA revolution?

  • While debated intervention was the most exciting result of the DNA revolution, the wider social and ethical implications of the new science were debated intensely.
  • Influential social and religious conservatives objected to what they saw as an effort to interfere with nature by manipulating the genetic profile of human beings, while others feared that the new knowledge would merely resurrect eugenics for the twenty-first century.
  • Any technology that was capable of identifying diseased genes might tempt those in positions of political power to once again interfere in reproductive behavior.

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