08.29.06
Exploring Eugenics
Okay, I confess, I’m a library nut. (A libnut? Heh). I went there again. . . and this time I browsed through the video section. A DVD called “Nazi Medicine” caught my eye, so I added it to the books I wanted to check out and headed for the checkout desk. When I got home, I plopped it into my son’s laptop when he wasn’t looking (he knows I do this occasionally, so he’s okay with it). That way I could read my emails on my computer and watch the DVD at the same time. As expected, the documentary had a lot of information that I had already heard about, you know, the more commonly known stuff. But interestingly, it started to delve into a little more detail about some Nazi medical experiments and a little background regarding eugenics. The first thing I started thinking was, “oh, how awful!” I had always equated the Nazi with eugenics as we’ve all been taught about their ideology of a superior race and their attempts at eliminating the undesirables. However, this DVD documentary pointed out that eugenics had been promoted first in the United States. And that the Nazi admired the United States and adopted the concept of eugenics from the United States. This was something I had not known!
So I did a small search on eugenics and found that according to Wikipedia eugenics is “a social theory advocating the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention. The purported goals have variously been to create healthier, more intelligent people, save society’s resources, and lessen human suffering. Earlier proposed means of achieving these goals focused on selective breeding while modern ones focus on prenatal testing and screening, genetic counseling, birth control, in vitro fertilization, and genetic engineering.” As far as the history of eugenics, Rethinking Schools Online claim that it was English mathematician Sir Francis Galton who first coined the term eugenics in 1883. They also have a little more history on eugenics of how it came to be accepted in America by feeding off of the fears of white middle and upper class Americans due to the influx of poor immigrants and southern slaves and rapid social and economic change. Eugenic ideology, it goes on to say, “worked its way into the educational reform movements of the 1910s and 20s, playing a key role in teacher training, curriculum development, and school organization. It also provided the guiding ideology behind the first IQ tests. Those tests were used to track students into separate and unequal education courses, establish the first gifted and talented programs, and promote the idea that educational standards could be measured through single-numbered scores. Eugenic ideas about the intellectual worth of students penetrated deeply into the fabric of American education.”
From this and further explanation at the Rethinking Schools Online link, it does appear that America had in fact already adopted the ideas of eugenics and were already putting some of its principals into practice years before the Nazi regime came into power in the 1930s and culminating in the 40s. According to the Nazi Medicine DVD, the bold implimentation of euthanasia and other eugenic concepts by the Nazi were actually applauded by United States leaders. This I found surprising because today when we think of eugenics it has a negative connotation of racism including the killing of the weak and handicapped. We don’t think of the U.S. being allies with the Nazi and involved with any of that. But here we see that the U.S. leaders did not find eugenics to be a negative concept, but rather saw it as a positive step Germany was taking towards the advancment of their society. U.S. medical doctors even met at conferences with Nazi medical doctors who had been conducting human experimentation. The results and information of their experiments on human subjects were known and discussed. Yet Nazi doctors are now commonly thought of as monsters, while U.S. doctors are thought of as icons even though they both have been cut from the same fabric. That is, not only did U.S. doctors know and meet with Nazi doctors, but it has been discovered that U.S. doctors also conducted unconscionable human experimentation during the same time period.
At first it’s hard to fathom why so many questionable medical experiments on human beings have been conducted and even sanctioned by our own government. But when I realise the implications of eugenics and that the American people accepted it, then U.S. medical experiments such as those
described by Gregory E. Pence in his book Classic Cases in Medical Ethics starts to make sense. The goal of eugenics is to improve and further the advancement of society, thus those of us considered less than perfect are expendible and are mere pons along the road to the ideal society. In Pence’s section titled, “Secret Nuclear Medical Experiments: A Parallel Episode?” [In reference to his previous discussion on the Tuskegee Study] he writes that, “In 1994, Hazel O’Leary, Secretary of the Department of Energy, began to declassify 32 million pages of secret documents about research on nuclear energy by the federal government during World War II and through the cold war. Among the initial findings was the revelation that physicians working for the government had used many Americans as human guinea pigs in radiation experiments.” Examples of such experiments were the use of 130 male prisoners, most of whom were African American. They were paid $200.00 to undergo x-ray radiation of their testicles. Afterwards these men had vasectomies. I’m pretty confident that these men did not realise the danger for which they were exposing themselves. I mean who in their right mind would allow their testicles to be exposed to radiation for a mere $200.00 unless they had no idea of the damage that could be caused. Another unfortunate victim was a poor Texan with a leg injury. He was injected with plutonium in the injured leg, which was later amputated. A woman by the name of Eda Charlton suffering from mild hepatitis entered Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester New York and was “secretly” injected with plutonium-239 to study how the body eliminates radiation. She was followed for years so that the effects could be observed. Joseph Hamilton of the University of California at Berkeley injected 18 unsuspecting patients diagnosed with cancer with plutonium. From the 1940s until the 1960s, as many as 1,500 military aviators and members of submarine crews were given radium treatments. The treatments involved exposing them to encapsulated radium on the end of wires inserted high into their nostrils for several minutes. They were not told why they had been selected or what the purpose of the experiment was. In the 1950s an experiment called the Green Run took place wherein federal scientists deliberately released a cloud of radioactive iodine-131 in eastern Washington state to see how far downwind it would get. The cloud reached Spokane and the California-Oregon border carrying hundreds of times more radiation than was emitted by the accident in 1979 at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor. These are but a glimpse of the studies hidden from the public. It’s mind boggling to think that there are 32 million pages documenting evidence to the unspeakable disregard for human life.
So, why again does our government allow these outrageous experiments to be conducted? Notice who conducts these experiments. It is not some rogue mad scientist tucked away in a remote island, but our own government hired and paid scientists and doctors. These types of experiments were being conducted by our military, the Department of Energy, the University of California, Strong Memorial Hospital, and others facilities of similar caliber–institutions that we know and trust. We disdain the Nazi doctors for the crimes we feel they have committed, but our own doctors have also committed the unthinkable. Perhaps eugenics is the driving force that we should disdain and take heed that it does not creep back into our current medical system. But I’m afraid eugenics may still be alive and well in America. Aborting the unwanted, invitro fertilization for the selection of specific genetics in a child, genetic studies aimed at weeding out unwanted genetic traits, the right to assisted deaths, genetic cloning are all considered acceptible by a great many Americans today and are the same vehicles by which eugenics thrives. Are we continuing to flirt with a possible re-enactment of a tragic history? Or is it not history but what is currently happening right now? Are there currently secret tests being conducted on unsuspecting people today? Would the recent approval of the FDA to allow viral additives to our food supply without our knowledge of which foods contain those additives be another mass experimentation study? Should we be so trusting to enter clinical trials? It appears that experiments such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, radiation experiments conducted on prisoners and other citizens, drug testing on third-world country citizens, and various other tests that were declassified years after testing had been performed on unwitting subjects is the natural outcome of embracing eugenics. How else could such actions be justifed?
We need to be independent thinkers and consider the natural outcome of our decisions. We need to be careful which philosophies we accept to live by and stand firm by those choices, otherwise, others will bestow their wills upon us, and our leaders may one day wield our lives as if we were nothing more than pawns.
I didn’t expect that this one trip to the library would stir such misgivings in me, but I am grateful to be reminded of the importance of learning and understanding history. The health and safety of my children may depend on it.
