Friday, March 31, 2000

Eugenics Site Illuminates a Dark Chapter in the Annals of Science By SCOTT CARLSON The Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement opens with George Santayana's famous statement: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The Image Archive illuminates a dark chapter of American scientific history -- a time when an obsession with heredity and social cleanliness led to racial discrimination and forced sterilizations. Such campaigns are usually associated with Nazi Germany, not the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. David A. Micklos, director of the DNA Learning Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which set up the Web site, thinks a study of the eugenics movement of the early 1900's is especially timely today. Although some of the eugenicists' more bizarre beliefs -- such as the idea that a gene for a "love of the sea" made certain people natural naval officers -- seem unlikely to resurface, our modern obsession with heredity, our willingness to tinker with genes, and our racial rifts and economic disparities could make a dangerous brew, he says. So Mr. Micklos and a group of researchers and academics are collecting documents from the American eugenic era and posting them on the Image Archive, along with a history of the movement that contrasts fact and scientific folly. Mr. Micklos supports modern genetic research, but he wants people to consider its social implications. "The point here was to get people to think about the potential problems of human genetic research," he says. "So it occurred to me to go back in time in American history when genetics intersected with public policy with negative consequences." He says that even the best histories of the eugenics movement "are academic works and are really not accessible to a general audience, and none of it has been on the Web." The Image Archive includes a series of essays on the social and scientific origins of eugenics, the laws against miscegenation that eugenicists promoted, and the methods and flaws of eugenicists' research, which was often biased against blacks, Jews, Eastern Europeans, and American Indians. The essays' straightforward, journalistic prose seems tailored for high-school students or young adults. The site's main attraction is its searchable archive of more than 1,200 images of photographs, letters, and reports related to the eugenics movement. The materials are borrowed from the American Philosophical Society Library, Truman State University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and other sources. The images can be enlarged for detail, formatted for printouts, or purchased for publication or educational use. The site was started two years ago with a grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health. Mr. Micklos said the DNA Learning Center is seeking additional funds to double the number of images on the site. The DNA Learning Center has blurred out some of the names on the documents, but otherwise they are offered without alteration or editorial comment. Mr. Micklos wants the documents to speak for themselves. "You like to get people to compare the present to the past, but not lead them around by the nose," Mr. Micklos says. "You'd like them to see some of the silly things that scientists said back then, and understand why they might have held those ideas. "You want them to realize that knowledge is always changing, and realize that you have be careful when you base social policy on things that emanate from science." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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