Eugenics is a science that aims to purify the gene pool, especially of humans, by controlling reproduction to assure the birth of offspring with desired traits. The roots of eugenics go back to ancient Greece, where Plato's Republic lauds procreation by the best parents. The term eugenics, derived from the Greek word eugenes (good in birth), was first used in 1883 by the British scientist Francis Galton. Advocates of eugenics sought to counter Charles Darwin's theory of natural evolution with human-controlled outcomes. American biologist Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944), founded the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1910. Davenport's work there led some of the first research in human eugenics during the early 1900s.

Environmental eugenicists emphasized prenatal care and a clean environment to ensure "positive" eugenics. Negative eugenics reached its apex during the Nazi regime (1933–1945) in Germany, which sterilized and murdered the "racially unfit." By the late twentieth century, eugenics and the Holocaust were linked. Yet earlier, some states and the U.S. government mandated sterilization for persons with severe genetic disabilities, and immigration laws in 1924 sought to reduce the number of immigrants from areas considered less desirable, such as eastern and southern Europe. In the 1950s, and most dramatically since the 1980s, human genetics replaced eugenics as the accepted approach to planned reproduction. Genetic counseling and sophisticated screening for genetic or chromosomal diseases or disorders inform parents about reproductive options. Will labeling fetuses "defective" or "less desirable" reintroduce selection by abortion, voluntary sterilization, or birth control? Some feminists and liberal religious groups embrace freedom of reproductive choices, while persons with disabilities, Roman Catholics, and conservative Protestants fear that it will lead to a disregard of human life from conception forward.

With the completion in the year 2000 of the sequencing of the human genome, determining genetic anomalies or, some say, even the genetic roots of destructive social behavior will trigger the wide dissemination of genetic information. Confidentiality becomes crucial. Some fear that human hubris, like that exhibited by the mythic figures Prometheus or Pandora, will engineer the engineer as well as the engine along an unknown track. Eugenics merged with genetic engineering produces scientific triumphs, moral challenges, and fears about things like human germline alteration and dissemination of pathogenic bacteria. There are dangers in policies of noninterference (as plagues and epidemics testify) as well as in genetic enhancement in which the definition and social policies establishing the "fit" are externally, rather than individually, determined. The slippery slope argument suggests that once certain traits are screened (e.g., color blindness or skin color) they will be eliminated or altered. The challenge is to determine the difference between therapeutic and eugenic measures.

At heart, one's definition of moral dilemmas surrounding eugenics is affected by one's view of knowledge as neutral or value-laden. If "improving" the human condition is a laudable end that genetic engineering can achieve, then this knowledge is good. Some believe that obligations to future generations and exorbitant health care costs provide a moral mandate to screen and treat curable diseases. Is consideration of supremely compromised fetuses, profoundly disabled persons, or comatose elderly from the perspective of financial and social burdens a sign of a highly moral society or an irresponsible one? Hermann Muller, for one, argues that the gene pool is at risk without positive eugenics, while Gregory Pence argues in Classic Works in Medical Ethics that even with sperm and eggs from genetically "superior" fathers and mothers, predicting "perfect" children is uncertain at best.

See also ABORTION; BIOTECHNOLOGY; DARWIN, CHARLES; ETHNICITY; GENE PATENTING; GENETIC ENGINEERING; GENETICS; GENETIC TESTING; HUMAN GENOME PROJECT; PLATO; PLAYING GOD; REPRODUCTIVE TECHNOLOGY; SOCIOBIOLOGY

ABIGAIL RIAN EVANS