The Experts below are selected from a list of 1479 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Jon Beckwith - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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On the social responsibility of scientists.
Annali dell'Istituto superiore di sanita, 2001Co-Authors: Jon BeckwithAbstract:The author outlines the history of genetics in the United States, looking at all the social and political implications of it, too often underestimated by the geneticists themselves. In contrast to physicists, who were forced to recognize the consequences of their role in the development of the atomic bomb and who openly carried a historical burden from their past, geneticists had no historical memory and were essentially ignorant of their own "atomic" history: the Eugenics Movement in the first half of 20th century, which significantly affected social policy in the United State and Europe. Few geneticists, in fact, until recently, were aware of the Eugenics Movement itself. It was only with the extreme misuse of genetics by German scientists and the Nazi Government that some English and US geneticists began to speak out more openly. The author sees in this lack of awareness the major responsibility of geneticists for the misrepresentation and misuse of science and also calls for a better interaction between scientists and those who work in other social fields; a communication gap between the two cultures holds dangers for us all.
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A historical view of social responsibility in genetics
BioScience, 1993Co-Authors: Jon BeckwithAbstract:Today the science of genetics presents society with a double-edged sword between scientific research and social responsibility. There are parallels between conditions no and in the early part of the century in the USA. In both periods dramatic breakthroughs generated highly productive genetics research. In the early 1900s, this was accompanied by a powerful Eugenics Movement; today public attention is shifting to genetic explainations and genetic solutions to health and social problems. The article gives an overview of the Eugenics Movement, summarizes the changes in views and the growth of molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s, mentions the technical breakthroughs of the 1970s, and summarizes the attitudes during the recominant DNA era and about the Human Genome Project. The author points out that the overextension of the applications of genetics can have profound effects on society. He concludes that concerns about the social consequences of the new genetics and the Human Genome project are being relegated to ethicists, social scientists, lawyers, and other nonscientists. Scientists have a key role to play and a responsibility to ensure that progress in their field is not used to harm rather than benefit people. 57 refs.
Lauris C. Kaldjian - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Eugenic Sterilization and a Qualified Nazi Analogy: The United States and Germany, 1930-1945
Annals of internal medicine, 2000Co-Authors: Andre N. Sofair, Lauris C. KaldjianAbstract:In the United States and Germany before World War II, physicians participated in state-authorized eugenic sterilization programs in an attempt to prevent persons deemed to possess undesirable heritable characteristics from propagating. A comparison of U.S. and German histories reveals similarities that argue against easy dismissal of a Nazi analogy. On the basis of a review of editorials in New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association from 1930 to 1945 it is difficult to accept the suggestion that the alliance between the medical profession and the Eugenics Movement in the United States was short-lived. Comparison of the histories of the eugenic sterilization campaigns in the United States and Nazi Germany reveals important similarities of motivation, intent, and strategy and differences that explain why support for eugenic sterilization in the United States gradually weakened. The Eugenics Movement in Germany was influenced by economic crisis, radical nationalism, Hitler's totalitarianism, and the medical profession's willing participation and attraction to Nazism for financial and ideological reasons. In the United States, a combination of public unease, Roman Catholic opposition, federal democracy, judicial review, and critical scrutiny by the medical profession reversed the momentum of the Eugenics Movement and led to the conclusion that eugenic sterilization should be voluntary.
Saul Lerner - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (review)
Shofar, 2006Co-Authors: Saul LernerAbstract:Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, by Christine Rosen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 286 pp. $37.50. In her very interesting book, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, Christine Rosen has written an important, detailed, and rather frightening account of how the American religious community of the early 20th century came to support the Eugenics Movement. She specifically documents how Protestant, Jewish, and a limited number of Catholic religious leaders contributed to making American Eugenics the foremost Eugenics Movement in the world by the 1920s and sought the creation of a "good society" in America by means of those methods that the Eugenics Movement advocated: sterilization, immigration restriction, incarceration, intelligence testing, and statistical analysis applied to the racial/ethnic/genetic backgrounds of families. Underlying the assumptions on which American Eugenics rested were racism, bigotry, pseudo-science masquerading as science, the assumption that many immigrants and lower socio-economic level Americans could not be assimilated into U.S. society, and a quasi-religious zeal to inflict Eugenics on the people of the United States and, thereby, create a master race in America. The American Eugenics Movement became the model used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who turned their zealousness for Eugenics as the means of preserving the health of the nation into, first, the murder of the disabled, and, subsequently, the brutalization and murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children in the final solution. Rosen's book is very much a part of a significant recent interest by the scholarly community in the study of the American Eugenics Movement, its influence in the United States, and its world-wide (or European) influence. In the United States, religious leaders, politicians, businessmen, scientists, philanthropic foundations, corporate sponsors, and others supported the effort to create a master race in the United States. All of this is well documented in such accounts as Edwin Black's The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003). Rosen's book adds much to the Black book and other accounts by describing in detail religious support of Eugenics, a matter to which Black gives much less attention. As strong advocates of the importance of ethical behavior, according to Rosen, liberal religious leaders were significantly influenced by the growing importance of the concept of "charity" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and by the development of the "Social Gospel" Movement. Committed to religious charity, they participated in many social reform and progressive activities in this period. Many were also troubled by foreign immigrants flooding to U.S. shores and raising fears and deep concerns on the part of America's political, cultural, economic, and religious leaders. As supporters of modernity, seeking to make their respective religions relevant to the twentieth century, liberal clergymen also became advocates of science and believed that science, including evolutionary biology, could help in bringing human progress and perfectibility. The Reverend Oscar Carleton McCullough (1843-1891), for example, minister to the Plymouth Congregational Church of Indianapolis, Indiana, produced "one of the first eugenic family studies in the United States and sought the merger of Protestant Social Gospel theology and Eugenics" (p. 27). Moreover, there was a tendency for advocates of Eugenics and its related "branches" to seek biblical support for their particular reform. Almost from the outset of the Eugenics Movement in America, there had been an easy association between religion and Eugenics. In 1907, in an attempt to effect God's will while resolving major social problems, the Stare of Indiana passed the first sterilization law in the United States. …
Stephen S. Jones - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Eugenic Opportunity Structures: Teaching Genetic Engineering at US Land-Grant Universities Since 1911
Social Studies of Science, 2007Co-Authors: Leland Glenna, Margaret A. Gollnick, Stephen S. JonesAbstract:The Eugenics Movement during the first half of the 20th century has been described as a transnational social Movement because of the way it flourished on different continents between World Wars I and II. Political opportunity structure is a term used to explain the social rules and resources that enable such a Movement to emerge seemingly simultaneously in diverse settings. One opportunity structure in the Eugenics Movement that requires further exploration is the university. Since US agricultural scientists were so prominent in the transnational Eugenics Movement, it is especially relevant to document the initiation and persistence of Eugenics courses in the US Land-Grant University (LGU) system. By examining course-offerings at LGUs through the 20th century, we demonstrate that Eugenics courses were available at prominent US research institutions not only prior to World War I, but also after the end of World War II, when Eugenics was considered bad and inappropriate science.
Christine Rosen - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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preaching Eugenics religious leaders and the american Eugenics Movement
2004Co-Authors: Christine RosenAbstract:With our success in mapping the human genome, the possibility of altering our genetic futures has given rise to difficult ethical questions. Although opponents of genetic manipulation frequently raise the specter of Eugenics, our contemporary debates about bioethics often take place in a historical vacuum. In fact, American religious leaders raised similarly challenging ethical questions in the first half of the twentieth century. Preaching Eugenics tells how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders confronted and, in many cases, enthusiastically embraced Eugenics-a Movement that embodied progressive attitudes about modern science at the time. Christine Rosen argues that religious leaders pursued Eugenics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets. The liberals and modernists-those who challenged their churches to embrace modernity-became the Eugenics Movement's most enthusiastic supporters. Their participation played an important part in the success of the American Eugenics Movement. In the early twentieth century, leaders of churches and synagogues were forced to defend their faiths on many fronts. They faced new challenges from scientists and intellectuals; they struggled to adapt to the dramatic social changes wrought by immigration and urbanization; and they were often internally divided by doctrinal controversies among modernists, liberals, and fundamentalists. Rosen draws on previously unexplored archival material from the records of the American Eugenics Society, religious and scientific books and periodicals of the day, and the personal papers of religious leaders such as Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rev. John M. Cooper, Rev. John A. Ryan, and biologists Charles Davenport and Ellsworth Huntington, to produce an intellectual history of these figures that is both lively and illuminating. The story of how religious leaders confronted one of the era's newest "sciences," Eugenics, sheds important new light on a time much like our own, when religion and science are engaged in critical and sometimes bitter dialogue.