Gary Wolf Quotes
Though social eugenics was discredited long ago, we still often think of the genome in quasi-eugenic terms. When we read about the latest discovery of a link between a gene and a disease, we imagine that we've learned the cause of the disease, and we may even think we'll get a cure by fixing the gene.
Wolf, Gary. "The Mouse Factory." Wired, vol. 14, no. 2, Feb. 2006.
under the law Physicians had to report to the committee all cases of births with serious congenital defects such as down’s syndrome. A committee of three NAZI appointed Physicians would then review the case files and decide which children should be allowed to live and which should be murdered. Over 5000 German children or killed upon the orders of this committee.
Hitler’s Germany promptly passed the law which was the beginning of their program of human extermination and the Holocaust.
Science was progressing rapidly and Congress and the other legislatures of the world had not kept up with the scientific, legal or ethical implications of the progress. The result was that once a new technique was perfected, all the institutions were caught :flat footed, and sought out bioethicists to advise them.
The Eugenics Record Office was an activist organization advocating the forced sterilization of those people who they deemed to be inferior from a hereditary point of view. Most Americans are today shocked to find that this organization and its ideas were so influential that more than 30 states had passed similar laws. Only California and Virginia however were zealous in carrying them out . By 1935, 20,000 forced sterilizations had been carried out in the United States. The Supreme Court at the time even found such laws Constitutional. See {603680}.
Gary Wolf is an American writer, contributing editor at America's Wired magazine, and co-founder of the Quantified Self. Wolf earned a BA from Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, and an MA from UC Berkeley.
