Eugenics Now

I would guess that if I say the word eugenics, your mind will go either to the past or to the future: to the Nazis, the Holocaust and maybe sterilisation programs in the USA, or to maybe GATTACA and other future designer baby scenarios that people have been warning about for more than 25 years. But the year when the tree of eugenics really began to blossom is 2025.

(This image, from the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921,  illustrates the way that the base of eugenics was always in academia.)

This year, three things happened. Firstly, a bunch of tech billionaires have set up companies to start doing human genetic modification (HGM), whilst IVF companies have started screening embryos for high IQ. Secondly, there have been the announcement in the UK about plans to sequence the genomes of every baby at birth, whilst the Wellcome Trust announced it was funding a research project to chemically synthesise the human genome. Other scientists are making progress on creating artificial eggs/sperm and embryos. The third thing that happened was the re-election of Donald Trump and the continuing ascendancy of far right politics, which has made open espousals of both new and very old eugenic ideologies, including by those right-wing tech billionaires, increasingly frequent. We have a perfect storm here, one that requires us to not only sit up and take notice but to act. Eugenics is now.

’They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast’

More on those key developments below, but first we need some perspective on the history of eugenics. For a more in-depth analysis see our forthcoming briefing, ‘What is eugenics?’

There is not space here to properly recount the history of the first wave of eugenics, or what was bad about it: the determination to abrogate basic human norms of care for the weak, the right to life and the fundamental equality of status of all human beings, in the name of the greater good of the national gene pool; the insistence on genetically-determined inequality amongst individuals and the corresponding racist, anti-semitic, classist and ableist judgements about social groups; the obsession with national degeneration caused by the over-breeding of the feckless working classes, and especially the burden of the ‘feebleminded’ and other ‘defectives’,  leading to their forced institutionalisation and sterilisation; the racist immigration laws, including the 1905 Aliens act in Britain (which was partly instigated by eugenicists) and the 1925 Johnson-Reed Act in the USA; the utopian-technocratic drive to remake society on the basis of applied biology. It all finally culminated in the murder of hundreds of thousands of disabled people in the Nazi Aktion T4 programme, and finally in the Holocaust. This is the familiar litany of the horrors of eugenics, and it is bad enough.

The first wave of eugenics arose at a particular point in the history of industrial capitalism, a period of crisis and social disorder. Boom and bust cycles in the late 19^th century, extreme inequality and the challenge of socialism led to the beginnings of the welfare state and of state management of the economy and society. In industry, the Scientific Management of Frederick Taylor made ever greater demands for efficiency and managerial control over workers and eugenicists made direct connections between Taylorism and their efforts towards national efficiency. Competition amongst the European imperial powers led to fears about national competitiveness, and to greater emphasis on meritocracy, although class divisions remained strong. Meanwhile scientific and technological breakthroughs were leading to great prestige for science and hopes for the betterment of humanity.

In the first half of the 20^th century, eugenics was widely accepted across the political spectrum and although its mainstream was strongly coloured with the class and race prejudices of the time, it was also championed in progressive/social democratic circles as embodying an enlightened, scientific and humane social reform. Eugenics was rejected by most of the left and labour movements because of its obvious class prejudice, but there were even prominent Communist eugenicists. An underlying commonality of technocratic philosophy between these leftists and the eugenics movement was the utopian dream of a ‘New Man’. Many eugenicists, including Francis Galton, did not believe in state coercion, and argued that people should be persuaded to make better choices for their families. Huge swathes of middle-class social reformers regarded eugenics as a progressive form of humanitarianism, a way of avoiding unnecessary suffering.

Thus the version of the history of eugenics as defined by right-wing politics, state coercion and a focus on improving the national genepool is only partially true. This liberal narrative can mislead us badly when we begin to think about eugenics in the present.

Since 1945 and the world’s revulsion at the crimes of Nazism, liberalism has been the dominant cultural and political force in Western societies, until the last 10 years. The central narrative of liberalism is about progress through enlightened reason, especially science and technology and opposition to racism and other reactionary ideologies. Thus the liberal narrative about eugenics is in fact critical to its own self-definition as the ‘other’ or opposite against which liberalism defines itself. Accordingly, liberalism picks certain characteristics of eugenics prior to 1945 and labels them as the decisive and defining features. Thus, eugenics is bad in the liberal view because it is based upon too much coercive control by the state over the individual, violating individuals’ human rights; because it is based on oppressive ideologies that wish to get rid of certain groups of people; and because it inadmissibly insists that people’s worth is mostly defined by the genes they are born with, rather than by their social environment and their own choices. It is not that those critiques of some aspects of classical eugenics are wrong, but by using them to define what eugenics is, we miss things of critical importance.  Finally, because the traditional liberal model of science and technology insists that they are separate from politics, harm arising from them must be due to ‘bad science’ and to ‘abuse’ of science by politicians.

So while we must always remember the horrors of pre-1945 eugenics, these definitions of eugenics tend to become positively counter-productive when we look at eugenics after 1945. After 1945, eugenics was forced to retrench, and many eugenicists were genuinely horrified by what they regarded as the ‘excesses’ of the Nazis. Faced with the horrors that arose from the abrogation of fundamental human rights by doctors, it was found necessary to reassert them formally in the Nuremberg Code and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But despite the drastic damage to its reputation, and the repeated attempts of liberals to stab it with their steely knives, it has been impossible to kill the beast of eugenics, and it has continued to exist in a variety of forms, changing to fit the social, political and economic conditions under which it operates, and mostly disavowing the term eugenics.

In very brief summary, some of the ways in which eugenics has persisted are:

• old-fashioned coercive sterilisation laws, which continued to operate in many countries after 1945, and sterilised more people than prior to 1945.
• Forced, coercive and semi-coercive population control programmes in the Global South, instituted by eugenics movements and often targeting indigenous people. These programmes sterilised far large numbers of women than all the overt eugenics programs
• the continued existence of national eugenic societies as academic societies that advise government
• continued popularity of the narrative of ‘racial’ differences in IQ, especially in the USA. During the Johnson government in the UK, Dominic Cummings, a classic technocratic enthusiast for genomics and behavioural genetics, attempted to introduce a self-declared scientific racist as a science adviser in Downing Street and another eugenicist as head of his pet Advanced Research and Innovation Agency.
• development of reproductive and genetic technologies by eugenically-minded scientists, or under the auspices of/with funding by the eugenics movement
• continued strong public consensuses that if the birth of disabled people can be prevented then it should be
• Open advocacy of eugenics by transhumanists
• the continued justification of prenatal screening programmes on the basis of the economic savings to the state from not having to treat disabled people. Many disabled people regard prenatal screening as a form of eugenics.
• even after 1990 there have been examples of old-fashioned eugenics, especially in the Americas: indigenous people were targeted for sterilisation in Peru in the 1990s and Canada in the 2000s; in the USA prisoners were the target in late 2000s, and in Donald Trump’s first term of office, it was detainees in one of his ICE detention centres.

See our timeline of eugenics for more details of these post-1945 examples. Thus eugenics has persisted in both subtle and brutal forms in a way that should not happen according to the liberal definition. The reason that eugenics arose in the first half of the 20^th century and enjoyed support across the political spectrum (including some communists and many liberals and social Democrats) was because it made sense within the economic social and political structures of industrial capitalist societies. It continued to do so after 1945: at the most basic level, a society built upon unrestricted technological control over nature, and defining progress as the continual extension of that control, is bound to eventually use technology to control human reproduction. And in a competitive society, this will always tend towards the elimination of those with ‘bad genes’, and efforts to ‘enhance’ human beings.

By the 1960s, the Eugenics Societies and other fellow travellers could see that the use of the term eugenics was counter-productive. Moreover, it was unnecessary. Many of the conditions that led to the emergence of eugenics, particularly the larger size of working class families had by then begun to disappear. Eugenicists knew that they could rely on a few key characteristics of industrial-capitalist societies to push eugenics forward. In addition to the built-in dynamic of technological modernisation and the control of nature, ongoing disability, race and class oppression and the increasingly competitive meritocratic nature of Western societies help drive eugenics forward. In the 1970s, as part of the development of neoliberalism, there was ever-increasing emphasis on the management of risks, particularly personal health risks, which have increasingly become part of the duty of each citizen.

Together, they realised, these factors would lead to the very things that eugenicists of the first half of the 20^th century wanted, without the need for coercion or even political advocacy. The eugenic societies became academic charities. The developing neoliberal paradigm provided eugenics with a new ally to replace the state: entrepreneurial bioscience and reproductive technology industries, which increasingly became seen by the state as key drivers of economic growth. In the neoliberal mindset, in which ‘there is no such thing as society’ Anglo-American bioethics developed a discourse for evaluating (and almost invariably approving) new genetic and reproductive technologies, which rules out as ‘political’ considerations of how these technologies would change society as a whole. Instead, the primary imperative of ‘ethics’ has become a consumerist principle of patient/client autonomy and choice. Meanwhile, state funded research projects served as subsidies to industries, bringing forth first IVF, then genetic engineering and in the 1990s, the Human Genome Project. The late 1990s saw the birth of the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, Dolly the Sheep.

The development of genetic engineering technologies in the 1970s and the first serious attempts at human gene therapy in the early 1990s provided an impetus to efforts by policymakers to ensure that these technologies did not form the basis of a new techno-eugenics. Many countries including the UK passed domestic legislation or signed international treaties prohibiting cloning and HGM. The UK also decided to regulate the genetic testing of embryos, restricting testing to serious medical conditions, in order to prevent a designer baby market in embryos selected for cosmetic or other desired characteristics such as IQ. For a while, critics of eugenics breathed a little more easily.

But these laws have not prevented the penetration of neoliberal market relations into human reproduction and the creation of the beginnings of a free market consumer eugenics. In the USA, for example, egg donation for infertile women is commercial, with most egg donors receiving $5-10,000 per donation. But if you are a tall, athletic beautiful woman from an Ivy league University, you can get $50-$100,000. The logic of eugenics and capitalism are perfectly aligned: a ‘superior product’ commands a higher price. On the other hand, undesired characteristics can be swiftly got rid of: the Danish sperm bank, Cryos’, which supplies the vast majority of sperm for donation in the UK, no longer supplies sperm from redheaded donors, ‘since there is no demand for this in the UK market’. There can be little doubt that the strange prejudice in the UK against redheaded people is a 1500-year-old relic of Anglo-Saxon racism against Celts. Meanwhile, globalised commercial surrogacy has created the infrastructure for a fully-fledged industrial production system for babies.

In 2012, the invention of a new genetic engineering technology known as ‘CRISPR’, has given a new boost to what is now called ‘synthetic biology’, and entire genomes of microorganisms have been synthesised in the laboratory. The new technology immediately gave rise to speculation about the possibilities of HGM, and the US, Chinese and British science academies immediately convened a series of ‘summits’ to discuss the possibility. At the second of these, in 2018, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui announced the birth of the first GM babies and claimed that he had been following the guidelines put forward by the US National Academies of Science. He was sent to prison in China for three years, but despite the global uproar, the science academies refused civil society’s calls for an immediate global treaty to ban HGM, and insisted that we should begin developing a pathway to its use. These scientists routinely ignore the strong global legal consensus against HGM.

Cultural shifts

In the last 20 years, a series of technological, political and deeper cultural shifts have also helped to bring us to the present extremely dangerous situation. It is useful to compare the situation now with that 100 years ago.  In the 21^st century, although organised labour and socialist movements are much weaker, neoliberal capitalism has created massive inequality, leading to the rise of populist movements of both left and right. These have been exacerbated by the financial crisis of 2008 and its ongoing aftermath, including austerity programs and the failure of Western economies to create growth. The deepening environmental crisis threatens the whole system, and is already manifesting in refugee flows, wars and uprisings. As in the 20^th century, geopolitical rivalries are leading to military and technological arms races. There is a deep and pervasive sense of crisis and impending disaster.

In the face of these threats and the darkening future, hope increasingly clings to the dogma of progress through technology. The suffusion of life with digital technologies has resulted in the techno-fix mentality becoming the default way of thinking for many people. In academia, there has been a concerted attack on traditional humanist resistance to the engineering and commodification of the human body and an increasing valorisation of individual freedom and consumer choice in body modification. 25 years after the sequencing of the human genome, although there have not been many direct medical benefits, ‘geneticisation’, the penetration of genetics into life and social policy has advanced by leaps and bounds, as have popular expressions of genetic determinism (‘X is in our organisation’s DNA’). The refusal of governments to regulate consumer genetic testing has fuelled this trend, and ancestry testing has helped rehabilitate the discredited concept of biological race even outside of far right circles. Even the politically-repudiated behavioural genetics is resurfacing in the form of ‘socio-genomics’.

Thus, in the 21^st-century the possibility of eugenics powered by vastly superior science and technical capability compared to that of the 20^th century, can again lean upon some similar political conditions, technocratic philosophies of control of nature and ideologies of biological superiority and inferiority. In the 20^th century, the technocratic paradigm was one of centralised top-down control by the state, threatening uniformity. In our post-Fordist free-market societies, where marketing and control is tailored to the individual, it again makes sense that genetics as a science of individual difference (e.g. the promise of ‘personalised medicine’) should be used wherever possible. Within an overall system of risk avoidance and meritocratic competition in the job market, where the quality of ‘human capital’ is an increasingly critical factor in business success, it becomes natural that parents would wish to give their child ‘the best possible start in life’ through genetic selection or modification. In surveys, already a significant minority of the population is interested in genetically ‘enhancing’ their children with all the characteristics that first wave eugenics focused upon: superior intelligence, height, athleticism, etc, as well as racialised signifiers of beauty.

In summary, since 1945 eugenics has been quietly persisting, mostly under the radar, and has mostly divested itself of racism. Corporations have already realised that old-fashioned racism gets in the way of their access to the best human capital, so they have become fervent advocates of diversity and inclusion. The science and technology to create a far more sophisticated and pervasive form of eugenics (designer baby eugenics) has been slowly maturing, although it is not yet fully mature. People like me have been warning about this for the past 25 years, and it has been extensively discussed in the academic literature. But few people expected that eugenics would emerge again in a period of right wing authoritarianism.

Scientists sometimes naïvely argue that our still in many ways rudimentary understanding of genetics, and the fact that some technologies are still in development, means that designer baby eugenics is not feasible and is a ‘scare story’. They say that since most characteristics are affected by many genes, each with a small effect, it will be impossible to effectively select or modify people’s characteristics. Yet in the mid-2010s, one of the most outspoken advocates of HGM and genetic enhancements, the Nobel prizewinner George Church, publicly rebutted this argument, publishing a list of single genes that could be modified to enhance children. More importantly, we only have to look at the 20^th century to see how eugenics could do massive damage, though based upon a far more rudimentary understanding of genetics. The defects in our understanding are not apparently inhibiting the genetic testing market, for example.

The current moment

In 2025, things changed. In Britain, the right-wing Reform Party is leading in the opinion polls, with plans to withdraw from human rights treaties set up in the wake of 20^th-century eugenics. Although the science and technology are not yet fully mature, with the re-election of Donald Trump, the social and political circumstances in the USA have created an opportunity for eugenicist Silicon Valley technocrats that is too good to resist. They have a president in their pocket who talks about his ‘good German genes’, a phrase that sends a shiver down the backs of groups targeted for elimination in 20^th-century eugenics. It is interesting to note the way in which California was the centre of 20^th century eugenics in the USA and has again become its centre in the 21^st century. The Silicon Valley techbro billionaires (and indeed the whole Silicon Valley culture) have long been supporters of the trans-humanist version of eugenics, throughout the years of a dominant liberal/libertarian political consensus in that part of the world. This has more recently ramified into a ‘bundle’ of techno-utopian/techno-fascist ideologies described as ‘TESCREALism’. These religious ideologies of technological rationalism reach far beyond planet Earth and into the far future, envisaging the merger of human beings with technology, first as cyborgs and then as fully digital ‘post-humans’. In the last 10 years it has become clear through the ideology of long-termism that to some of its devotees, the welfare and indeed the possible almost complete extinction of humans 1.0 (i.e. non-technologically enhanced embodied humans like you and me) is of minor concern, as long as the post-humans can survive and multiply to numbers like 10⁵⁷. Others of this persuasion view the possible destruction of humans by ‘Artificial Superintelligence’ not as an existential threat, but as the natural progression beyond obsolete flesh and blood as ‘carriers of intelligence’.

Although it is beyond the scope of this post, it is important to note that these ideologies were fascist long before the second term of Donald Trump. They are based upon a totalitarian form of technocracy that has no limits to its vision of control, both of nature and human beings. Like 20^th-century fascism, they are the very opposite of conservative ideologies – they are revolutionary ideologies. They are a natural fit for an increasingly authoritarian political regime.

Adherents of these ideologies have had enough debate about pros and cons and they are seizing their moment to create facts. Once the overtly eugenic developments we have seen this year have been:

• the genetic screening of embryos in order to choose the one which will give rise to a person with the highest IQ
• a series of announcements by the Silicon Valley tech billionaires that they are creating start-up companies to develop and commercialise HGM, always a holy grail of eugenics.
• With the turn to the right in Silicon Valley, we are also seeing the emergence of more obviously old-fashioned forms of eugenics, also supported by figures such as Elon Musk. The last two years have seen conferences on ‘pro-natalism’, the idea that the world needs more highly intelligent people and less dumb ones. The intellectual elite should attempt (and be incentivised) to have as many children as possible. Musk, with his 11 children, has apparently been putting this into practice for some time. In the UK, there was an alarming amount of popular support for a proposal by a right-wing Tory MP, to ban cousin marriages (common amongst some communities of Pakistani origin), on the grounds that they lead to an increased risk of birth defects. This is an example of where commonsense neoliberal risk aversion can coincide with right-wing politics. The word eugenics was hardly mentioned in the debate and liberal supporters of progressive humanitarianism, as in the early 20^th century assumed that this was all about ‘prevention of suffering’.
• The announcement by British Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, of plans to proceed with the gene sequencing of all babies at birth, thereby creating the GATTACA scenario of pre-conception and pre-nuptial genetic screening to determine the genetic quality of the prospective partner, as well as serious risks of genetic discrimination and threats to human rights.
• There are plans to legalise HGM, through revision of the British HFE Act, in the next two years, by means designed to avoid proper parliamentary discussion.

In addition to these developments, there is reason for great concern about a series of reproductive and genetic technologies still in the pipeline, which would provide the capability for a techno eugenics programme going far beyond anything envisioned by the even the most visionary 20^th-century eugenicists. They include:

• artificial eggs and sperm produced from body cells: already achieved with live births in rodents, this would allow scientists to genetically modify such eggs and sperm prior to IVF, and to check the genes of the engineered egg/sperm before fertilisation. This would overcome the major safety issue in HGM, since when practised on embryos HGM technology needs to many ‘off target mutations’. However, the process of creating such egg/sperm might itself lead to subtle abnormalities. Artificial eggs/sperm would also allow bizarre possibilities such as a man producing eggs and fertilising them with his own sperm.
• Creation of artificial embryos from stem cells: progress is also being made in constructing embryos from stem cells, which could also be genetically modified prior to embryo construction. This would be a method of bypassing the need for eggs and sperm in creating an embryo. Ethicists are already debating the ethical status of these constructs.
• Artificial wombs: significant advances have also recently been made in the creation of artificial wombs that could support the growth of a child until term, thereby, as per Brave New World, creating a fully artificial/industrial system of production of human beings.
• Genome synthesis: this year the Wellcome Trust announced £10 million in funding for a project to develop technology for fully synthesising the human genome in the laboratory. Of course, genomes would then be designed with the use of artificial intelligence. This would allow thousands of genes to be changed at will, going far beyond the possibilities of genetic modification of natural genomes. It might lead for example to the production of specialist types of human, e.g. ‘drones’ for heavy manual labour, people with particular cosmetic attributes, etc.. But don’t worry, they have an ethics committee.

Conclusion

The current moment is the culmination of a continuous hundred and 50 year historical process of eugenics. Eugenics never went away, even after the disastrous reputational damage that it suffered after 1945. It is now vastly more scientifically mature and technologically capable than in the first half of the 20^th century.

The social consequences of designer baby eugenics, if not prevented are discussed in more detail in our forthcoming briefing, ‘What is Eugenics’, so they will only be briefly summarised here:

• the most profound impact of eugenics is the abolition of the politically critical idea of the fundamental equality of human beings, enshrined, for example, in the US constitution, and therefore of their equal human and civil/social rights. This runs counter to the last 250 years of democratic liberalism, and in some ways reinstates a feudal idea of inherently superior blood. Once some people are scientifically known to have enhanced capabilities, it will be impossible to prevent the emergence of a genetically-stratified society in which enhanced elites occupy higher, probably ruling positions. Social mobility will become a thing of the past, as will notions of equality, diversity and inclusion. As many people have noted, existing wealthy elites will, given the likely costs of designer baby technologies be able to give their children even-greater advantages over other children. Ultimately, such a genetically-stratified society is incompatible with democracy – why should the unquestionably inferior be allowed equal voting rights?
• The ability to design our children will empower existing race-, sex- class-, ability-, etc. based oppressions, allowing them to determine which kinds of human beings are born.
• Designing our children turns them into commodities, like any other product we buy in the marketplace, and they will be expected to conform to their genetic specifications. They will have little opportunity to be the unique imperfect individuals produced by the roll of the genetic dice in natural sexual reproduction.

We hope it is clear that such consequences need to be avoided at all costs. The designer baby eugenics predicted and warned against so often does not entail the state coercion and brutalities of the 20^th century. But precisely because it will not necessarily involve dramatic abuses of human rights, because it is so in tune with existing characteristics of neoliberal society, and because it will be sold to us as, ‘reproductive choice’, medical benevolence, progress through technology and as ‘not-eugenics’, it is likely to be palatable to many more people, and will have correspondingly deeper and more pervasive impact upon society. Of course, there is always the possibility, now seeming increasingly likely, that democratic liberal Western societies will collapse into authoritarian militaristic dictatorships, obsessed through competing with other such dictatorships through application of these technologies. Such a risk is, in itself, a sufficient argument for not developing and legalising those technologies.

The fact that the oft-predicted designer baby eugenics has come to the surface in Donald Trump’s authoritarian America makes the dangers that I and others have been warning about seem even more alarming and credible, because of the association of eugenics and fascism in the received liberal narrative about eugenics. However, it would be a mistake to think that incipient fascism is the driver of the new eugenics, and even more so to treat it as just another unpleasant aspect of that politics.

It isn’t. The scientific and technological projects that provide the basis of designer baby eugenics have been nurtured in the heart of mainstream biomedicine, as part of the normal process of economic/industrial development in Western societies. The liberal definition of what eugenics is serves the interests of the scientists who develop the technologies and doctors who wish to dissociate themselves from eugenics. They can rightly say that they are not racists and are not coercing anybody, so there can be no cause to question what they are doing. Equally part of the mainstream is an official ‘bioethics’ (the bioethics of government advisory committees), that confines itself to a individualist/consumerist advocacy of patient autonomy and a dedication to disproving all ethical and social arguments against the introduction of new technologies. At least in the USA, the techno-fascist ‘TESCREAL’ ideologies have become increasingly normalised in science. Political authoritarianism is merely an enabler of the entrepreneurial opportunist techno-pluto-crats of Silicon Valley. The leftish libertarian ideology that previously pervaded the Valley was equally supportive of the TESCREAL ideologies and the idea of consumer eugenics. As noted above, and as in the early 20^th century, a number of historical and social conditions have again conspired to push the  normally slow-developing processes of eugenics, perhaps prematurely, into the light.

So, to really understand the challenge we are now facing, we must get to grips with the processes and ideologies of mainstream technocratic power. We need to understand that these processes are not ‘inevitable’ nor are they necessarily ‘progress’. Decisions are made, almost entirely undemocratically, about which science and technology to fund and develop. It will need to ask the question, ‘progress for who?’ We will need to be able to stand up to the attacks of those who claim we are fighting against cures for sick children, and to say no to scientists and doctors who genuinely think they are doing the right thing. Thankfully, this is not difficult, as there is no medical case for HGM, for example. If we fail to do this and focus only on the obvious right wing bad actors, designer baby eugenics will gradually develop, whilst we are looking the other way. We will need to challenge the pervasive and systematic scientific irresponsibility (for example of those elite groups pushing HGM forward), that insists that any attempts to question what scientists are doing is ‘censorship’ or ‘restriction of academic freedom’. It is time, again, to call for democratic control of science and technology.

The present moment, whilst extremely dangerous, is also an opportunity. Much as in the early 20^th century, a group of enthusiastic scientists with techno-utopian visions of a more efficient society have raised the banner of eugenics. We have a short window of opportunity, when the technologies are still in the middle to late stages of development, and when the political context highlights the dangers of eugenics. We have a decisive advantage over those who fought eugenics in the first half of the 20^th century: we know what eugenics and fascism can do. But if we fail to act now, if we ‘wait and see’ what happens, the everyday processes of rolling out new technologies, including overwhelming barrages of propaganda about progress and benefits, designer baby eugenics will quickly become embedded and normalised. If there was ever a moment to apply the precautionary principle, it is now.

 

 

[DECLARATION] International Declaration Against Legalisation of Human Genetic Modification

See the website of the International Coalition to Stop Designer Babies 

The undersigned organisations and individuals support the existing strong international consensus against genetic modification of human beings (HGM*). We wish to express our great concern about and opposition to those scientific academies and others presently seeking to legalise HGM. HGM is medically unnecessary. Pursuing it is an act of extreme scientific irresponsibility, likely to result in enormously harmful consequences for individuals and for global society as a whole.

Human cloning and HGM were banned in international human rights treaties and in many countries in the 1990s, primarily because of the terrible history of eugenics. We support this deeply-felt and principled international ethical consensus. New technical abilities to conduct HGM do not change that consensus. We believe:

• Designing children’s genes runs counter to accepted basic visions of diversity and the inclusion and equality of all vulnerable individuals and minority groups. Rather than competitively genetically ‘enhancing’ children, we want to encourage a world that celebrates and accepts all individuals and groups of people and that does not rely on oppressive and biological determinist prejudices about what constitutes a ‘better’ human being. Allowing HGM would exacerbate existing social inequalities. It would be an act of scientific irresponsibility and, in a time of rising neo-fascism, of political irresponsibility as well.
• Like human cloning, HGM is referred to in international declarations and treaties as contrary to human dignity, because it reduces human beings, to the status of designed and optimised consumer objects.
• There are a range of robust alternative methods for avoiding genetic conditions, so the only advantage of HGM would be for ensuring 100% genetic parenthood of the child. It can never be ethical to submit a child to the severe health risks of genetic modification for this purpose.
• We are also concerned about the exploitation of and health risks to those sourced for eggs for research to make HGM possible.

We call upon the UN to create an international convention to permanently ban HGM and human cloning. For the sake of our children and of our common humanity we must not cross this ethical line.

* We use the term ‘human genetic modification’ (HGM) rather than ‘genome editing’. Scientists seeking to promote HGM introduced the later term to allay public concerns about creating designer children. We use the term ‘human genetic modification’ to refer to genetic modification of human eggs, sperm, or embryos to create a person who is genetically engineered in all cells of their body and will pass on the genetic changes to their offspring. Genetic engineering of cells for purposes of treating a particular disease as, for example, skin, liver, or lung cells, which we do not oppose, is usually referred to as somatic gene therapy.

Contact us: info at coalitionstopdesignerbabies.net

TO SIGN THE DECLARATION AS AN INDIVIDUAL OR AS AN ORGANISATION, PLEASE FILL IN THIS FORM

[VIDEOS] Why Your Movement Should Oppose Designer Babies – a mini conference

How do social movements’ politics connect to the campaign against designer babies?

On March 9th 2022, Stop Designer Babies, Gen-ethisches Netzwerk (Germany), Alliance for Humane Biotechnology (USA) and GeneEthics (Australia) organised a very successful mini conference with Vandana Shiva, Sarah Boon, Donna Dickenson, Tina Stevens, Claire Robinson, Pete Shanks, Bob Phelps and others. See here

Full event:

Section 1: Basics
– Introduction on CRISPR and Heritable Human Germ line editing: Shrese (SDB)
– Historical and contemporary perspective on Techno-eugenics: Tina Stevens (AHB)

Section 2: social movements against HHGE/eugenics
– Feminist perspective: Donna Dickenson
– Decolonial perspective: Vandana Shiva (Navdanya)
– Disability rights perspective: Sarah Boon (autisticallysarah.com)
– Environmental perspective: Claire Robinson (GMWatch)

Section 3: International perspective
– Critique of the international summits process: Pete Shanks (Centre for Genetics and Society)
– Germany: Taleo Stüwe (Gen-ethisches Netzwerk)
– France: Jérôme Santolini (Sciences citoyennes)
– Australia: Bob Phelps (GeneEthics)

CRISPR: “precise scissors” or “chainsaw”?

Scientists do like their metaphors. Like all metaphors they can be criticised for being misleading (see below), but when they affect issues of human and ecological safety, we must be extra careful. In biology, one of the most famous is that of the ‘genetic programme’, which influenced both the directions that research in life sciences took and our perception of the living world. Another is the description of the DNA as the “Book of life”. This linguistic metaphor has been heavily spun recently with the introduction of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology to the toolbox of the biotech industry. CRISPR, we are told, is a tool that would allow the ’editing’ of the genome, it is a ’molecular scissors’ allowing scientists to ‘cut and paste’ etc. All of these metaphors constructs an image of precision and infallibility. The ongoing push for the deregulation of CRISPR-like methods in the agro-industry (see the work of the Corporate Europe Observatory on this) mobilises this supposed infallibility to argue that the genetic manipulation of crops made through CRISPR would only precisely copy what ‘nature’ is doing, and therefore would not warrant any regulation or safety assessment of any sort. This is the argument of ‘indistinguishability’ (see here or here for a critique of this).

One problem with all of this is that CRISPR is not so precise. A 2020 list compiled by Dr Michael Antoniou lists the many studies showing the unintended mutational outcomes (changes made to the DNA molecule) produced by ‘gene editing’ in medical research. In short, when CRISPR is used to modify a genome, it is not unusual that this provokes unintended damage. Until now, the focus was mostly on what are called ‘off-target effects’, that is to say unintended changes can happen in areas different from the one that was targeted.

However, it has recently been acknowledged that there are many unexpected ‘on-target effects’, another major blow to the ‘scissors’ narrative. Not only does the CRISPR system cut at unintended places, but sometimes it does not even cut properly at the intended place… This has been reported for example this year in an April’s study by scientists from the Francis Crick Institute in the UK, which was particularly significant for us, since it dealt with the use of CRISPR in human embryos. An extensive review of these potential on-target effects was produced by GeneWatch UK this September. Their report focuses on the fact that the damage is done not so much by the cutting of the DNA, but that the rejoining (or repair) of the DNA by cellular enzymes after the cut is not properly ‘controlled’. According to the report, “such effects fundamentally challenge the notion of indistinguishability”.

To add to this, in April 2021 as well, a study published in Nature Genetics showed that CRISPR can cause another type of on-target effect that had not been detected before, chromothripsis, which refers to major chromosomal damage of the type that is known to be involved in some cancers. Reporting on this, GMWatch emphasized some interesting facts. One is that the tone of the paper, quite alarmist on a pre-print platform, was turned down a notch at the time of publication. The other is the probable impact on the shares of biotech companies based on CRISPR technologies. As one proponent of these technologies sheepishly reacted in the news section of Nature Biotechnology: “We as a community understand that we’re one serious adverse event away from a clinical hold on everyone”. But, he suggests, all is under control, for the perfect solution for this, the one that technocracy has been given us since its inception, is that: “We will have to mitigate [the unforeseen problems] retrospectively, in reactive mode.”

What is the significance of all this? To quote the GeneWatch report again: “Knowledge of DNA repair pathways is still an evolving field, leaving knowledge gaps and uncertainties around the extent and type of genetic damage being caused, and around any notion of predictability and thus subsequent safety of genome editing applications”. Another take-home message of the report is that scientists will tend to only find what they set out to look for, ignoring the limits of their own detection techniques (e.g. looking only at the site of cut will not allow the detection of off-target effects, looking at point mutations will not allow the detection of chromosomal rearrangements etc.). The result is a kind of cat-and-mouse game between claims of “precision and safety” and the constant discovery of new off- and on-target effects. What a surprise, in October it was shown, again!, that CRISPR gene editing causes whole chromosome loss…

Although Stop Designer Babies’ focus is primarily on the ethical, social and political consequences of allowing human genetic engineering, it is important to take these safety issues seriously. Thirty years of experience with crop and animal genetic engineering has taught us that genetic engineering is rarely ‘precise’ and these ‘unexpected’ effects can have very serious consequences. We simply cannot afford that with human beings, so we need a higher standard of safety there, a precautionary standard. This is particularly clear since there is no medical need to perform such manipulations of the human genome: all medical issues can be dealt with through other technologies that are now widely used and robust. It seems, frankly, crazy, to subject children to such dangerous technologies when simple alternatives are available.

Yet the scientific establishment bodies that keep holding ‘summits’ and proposing paths to clinical trials, rather than asking whether such trials are ever needed, keep pushing ahead regardless. Thus, it falls to critical scientists, doctors and small groups like Stop Designer Babies to speak up for common sense and rationality in the face of scientists’ irrational enthusiasms.

GM ‘designer babies’: breakthrough or nightmare?

Originally published in Red Pepper

In late 2018, when He Jiankui announced that he had created the world’s first genetically modified (GM) babies, part of the worldwide outrage was motivated by the hope that we would not have to deal with this issue for at least ten years. Since then, eugenics has reared its ugly head in the experience of minority ethnic and disabled people during the pandemic, and with the revelations that women were being sterilised without their knowledge in one of Donald Trump’s ICE detention centres in Georgia. In Britain, we had the prime minister’s then chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, trying to appoint outspoken eugenicists to advisory roles in number 10 and to head up his pet Advanced Research and Invention Agency.

Eugenics is here and now; in fact, it never went away. That is why nearly all industrialised countries put in place legal bans on the genetic engineering of human beings in the 1990s or earlier. But despite that, scientific establishment bodies, which cannot countenance the idea of banning any type of research or technological application, have been quietly moving forward with plans for clinical trials ever since He Jiankui’s announcement. They are meeting in London in March 2022 to push these plans. Stop Designer Babies will be there to oppose them.

Readers of Red Pepper will probably not need explanations as to why a genetically stratified society, created through consumerism and free market forces, with the rich being able to give their children extra advantages over ordinary children, should be resisted. We should not let social oppressions like racism, disability oppression, sexism, etc determine which types of children get born, through parents’ reproductive choices. Neoliberal eugenics can and already does exist without the state forcing anybody to do anything. Red Pepper readers will also understand why turning children into just another designed and optimised consumer commodity fundamentally undermines human rights.

However, the left’s basic humanitarianism and belief in progress through technology means it is sometimes insufficiently critical about scientists’ misleading claims that genetic engineering is necessary to prevent genetic diseases. Of course, such claims ignore disabled people’s arguments that disability is primarily caused not by their impairments, but by social oppression, including lack of accessibility and support.

Crossing the line

This is a very complex and difficult issue, and of course, women must have the basic right to choose. But they have little free choice in a society which does not provide adequate support for parents of disabled children. That is an ongoing struggle, and for the present, we must allow women, (who may for example already have a child with a genetic impairment), to make their choices.

But there already exist a range of options, including adoption, gamete donation, prenatal and pre-implantation genetic testing to allow families to avoid genetic disease. Genetic engineering is simply unnecessary and has big safety concerns. The exceptions to that, the cases where only genetic engineering can do the job (were it ever to be proved safe, which will be extremely difficult) are vanishingly rare. For the sake of a handful of people, who may not be able to have children that are 100% genetically related to them, are we prepared to cross the line into a world in which human evolution is steered by the forces of oppression and capitalism?

The truth is that the real market for genetically modified babies will be for ‘designer babies’, enhanced to compete better with other children, to satisfy parents’ whims, or to avoid (and thereby perpetuate) social oppressions. Experience with pharmaceuticals and surgery is that, where there is a market (and many surveys have shown that there will be a market for genetic enhancement) the line between medical treatment and cosmetic enhancement cannot be held.

And as we have seen with commercial surrogacy, national regulatory systems and bans are easily circumvented by industries which set up companies in countries where there is a pool of poor women, and no regulation. That is why Stop Designer Babies is campaigning for a global ban on human genetic engineering. If we want to avoid a future of free market eugenics, that is the only solution.

Stop Designer Babies is holding an online event to discuss these issues on 8 December 2021.

Dr David King is a former molecular biologist, who has been writing and campaigning on issues raised by genetic engineering and other technologies for the past 30 years. He is one of the founders of Stop Designer Babies and was a founder of the UK campaign against GM food.

The ‘bad apple’ and the frog

Stephen Roudschtein Blog posts are personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect Stop Designer Babies’ position.

The key framing of the story of the announcement of the birth of the first GM babies, was the classic ‘rogue scientist’ trope, beloved of cartoon writers. Much of He Jiankui’s behaviour, including secrecy and forging ethical review documents undoubtedly fits that pattern. But if you scratch the surface, it soon becomes clear that there is much more than one bad apple that is rotten in science. By condemning him, the scientific institutions try to make themselves look responsible. In fact, they prepared the ground for him, in many ways and must take the blame for that. As with the Catholic church, the ‘bad apples’ commit crimes because they have the confidence that comes from being part of institutions with vast social power and prestige.

In essence, from the point of view of the scientific institutions, He Jiankui did what those characters in comedies do, who say, “Oh my God! Did I just say that out loud!?” As a result, the world has woken up to the fact that consumer eugenics is not some science-fiction scenario, it’s real, here and now.

Engineering consent

The strategy of the scientific institutions was meant to be a replay of their now well-established technocratic method of engineering public ‘consent’ for each new technology they want to introduce.   In the usual run of things, first some new scientific or technological development happens. Then bioethicists produce reports saying that although the new technology challenges existing morality, cultural norms, and might have harmful social consequences etc., it should be allowed to go ahead in the name of scientific progress and consumer choice.

Third, a well-funded and thoroughly mendacious PR campaign is launched around a ‘public consultation’ process, in which the questions asked are designed to get the answer desired. In the course of this ‘public debate’, families with medical problems are pushed in front of the media. This frames the issue as Scientific Progress and Medical Benevolence versus (preferably religious/pro-life) irrational and uncaring naysayers.  Finally, in a few brief hours of debate, parliaments pass the desired legislation.

Frogs, potatoes and elephants

Normally, the procedure follows the story of the man who boils a frog (i.e. you and me) alive: why doesn’t the frog jump out of the pan? Because it is being heated so gradually that it never notices what is going on, it can never find the moment to jump.

In the case of human genetic engineering the scientific institutions had to be careful.  This issue has, for many years, been regarded as the most sensitive of all bioethical issues, the hottest of hot potatoes. That is why governments in nearly every industrialised country have actually banned it. It is, to say the least, highly unusual for governments to rule out certain areas of technological development before they are even feasible – there would have to be very good reasons for that.

The reason here, the enormous elephant in the room that geneticists and bioethicists don’t like to talk about, is the history of eugenics in the 20th century, the atrocities committed by geneticists and others in the name of ‘improving the human race’. The technocrats knew that, if they were not careful, they might come unstuck in the same way that they did over GM food in Europe, in the late 1990s. They would have to boil us very slowly.

Accordingly, this time the scientific establishment began more carefully, with an ‘international summit’ of scientists in late 2015 in Washington DC. Of course, no representatives of civil society were asked to speak. The final statement of that summit, which was supposed to be the international consensus about how to proceed in this area, acknowledged the great sensitivity and importance of this issue. So, we were reassured, nothing would move ahead until a process of creating a ‘broad societal consensus’ had been gone through.

Science out of control

Unfortunately, no-one knew what a process for creating broad societal consensus would look like, and no-one bothered to think about it much. Instead, the technocratic machinery moved into gear, the accelerator was pressed, it was business as usual. Little more than a year after the 2015 summit, the US National Academy of Science (NAS) produced a report saying that human genetic modification, for the purposes of preventing genetic disease would be ethically acceptable. In 2018, a scientist-dominated panel convened by the UK-based Nuffield Council on Bioethics, took the further unprecedented step, so far only taken by transhumanists and other self-declared eugenicists. In its wisdom, it decided that even genetically-‘enhanced’ designer babies could be ethically acceptable.

Thus, in less than three years, in a period when more and more evidence accrued that the new technology was not ready, the scientific institutions moved from tentative reassurance to full steam ahead. In ethically justifying what he did, He Jiankui said that he took the NAS report as a green light to proceed. Those Western scientists who condemn him and pretend to be so much more responsible, trained him and showed him the way.

Which bit of NO! did you not understand?

What this sad story shows is that even our august and sober scientific and ethical institutions cannot restrain their enthusiasm for technological conquest. They could not, even when they really needed to, wait just a little longer. For the truth is that, if you push almost any scientist hard enough, they will admit that they simply do not accept democratic control of science and technology. The very concept just doesn’t make sense in their technocratic worldview, in which they see themselves bravely striding forward to save humanity through technology. They are the good guys after all, aren’t they? How could anybody argue with ‘progress through technology’? We have heard enough of this from the Silicon Valley superheroes and their techno-fixes for everything to recognise it by now.

This is the scientific credo, no matter how well they can mouth the currently required phrase ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’.  Most scientists simply reject the idea that people have any right to say NO! To what they’re doing. Even though we pay their salaries, fund their research and have set up the nice universities where they work. No matter how little medical benefit there may be, no matter how great the risks to society, they simply MUST push ahead.  Unfortunately, the bit of NO they don’t understand is all of it.

Accordingly, in the neoliberal era, in the age of ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ (i.e. people, communities, whole societies), bioethics has become largely a matter of showing why accepted moral principles and social norms are no longer relevant. All must bow down to the Gods of profit, consumer autonomy and ‘progress through technology’. Even the demonstrated social catastrophe of eugenics cannot be allowed to get in the way.  He Jiankui lifted the veil on all this and showed us what technocracy looks like.

Now let’s see what democracy looks like

The Hong Kong summit in November 2018 was intended to consolidate the shift from ‘waiting for societal consensus’ to ‘paying attention to social concerns’ (!). Although they had already turned up the heat on the frog too fast, they were certainly not going to listen to civil society calls for a moratorium. They would probably have got away with it, had it not been for He Jiankui, who turned the heat under the frog right up to boiling point. Now it’s jumping; what happens next is up to you. Let’s see what democracy looks like.