Control : the dark history and troubling present of eugenics /

This book by Rutherford (biology and society, Univ. College London, UK) is sure to appeal to a wide audience, except for geneticists already familiar with the history of their discipline. Following a brief section on terminology and an introduction, the book is divided into two roughly equal parts. The first section discusses the history of eugenics, focusing on its development as both an idea and a practice in Britain, the US, and Germany. The motives for the practical application of this pseudo-science varied, spanning the eradication of disease, population limitation, and the preservation of the power and dominance of a putatively threatened white (and under the Nazis, Aryan) race, as did the methods for achieving these ends--e.g., selective breeding, involuntary sterilization, and/or the elimination of "undesirables." The second part explores developments in modern genetics, including techniques and research endeavors like the Human Genome Project, which clearly indicate both the complexity of the human genetic structure and the erroneousness of eugenicists' dream of finding simple solutions to schizophrenia, bipolar disease, and alcoholism, inter alia. One caveat: academic readers will have preferred footnotes that are referential (not just explanatory) and a heftier bibliography. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals. --Robert T. Ingoglia, St.Thomas Aquinas College

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. (Nov.)