Diane B. Paul

University of Massachusetts Boston | UMB · Department of Political Science

A perspective on the influence of evolutionary geneticist Richard C. Lewontin Open access: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/721258

This article explores difficulties encountered by those with no personal experience of a chronic disease or disability in accurately evaluating the quality of life with a condition present from birth. In most countries, cost-effectiveness analysis relies on ratings of health states by members of the general population, who must try to imagine what...

The Gene: From Genetics to Postgenomics expands and updates a 2009 book originally published in German. Its authors, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger and Staffan Müller-Wille, collaborated in developing the Cultural History of Heredity project, an almost decade-long research project at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, whe...

Sir Frederic Truby King (1858–1938) looms large in the history of New Zealand. Founder of the ‘Plunket Society’ devoted to infant and maternal welfare, prolific author of books and manuals, medical superintendent of the Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, and Director of Child Welfare, King was the first private citizen to be given a state funeral. Today, he...

In this Introduction, the editors explain why an exploration of eugenics in four Dominions of the British Empire—New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa—should contribute importantly to the comparative and international literature on eugenics. They note that these self-governing colonies reshaped ideas absorbed from the metropole in accord...

This volume explores the history of eugenics in four Dominions of the British Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. These self-governing colonies reshaped ideas absorbed from the metropole in accord with local conditions and ideals. Compared to Britain (and the US, Germany, and Scandinavia), their orientation was generally less...

In the 1960s and '70s, it was generally assumed that reproductive choices have social consequences and thus are a matter of social concern. Socially-responsible reproductive behavior, in turn, was assumed to entail minimizing the risk of transmitting grave genetic diseases. Over time, such a view came increasingly to be labelled "eugenics," a term...

By the 1950s, eugenics had lost its scientific status; it now belonged to the context rather than to the content of science. Interest in the subject was also at low ebb. But that situation would soon change dramatically. Indeed, in an essay-review published in 1993, Philip Pauly commented that a "eugenics industry" had come to rival the "Darwin ind...

Stephen Jay Gould famously used the work of Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) to illustrate how unconscious racial bias could affect scientific measurement. Morton had published measurements of the average cranial capacities of different races, measurements that Gould reanalyzed in an article in Science [1] and then later in his widely read book The...

This article provides an overview of the history of eugenics, from the Greek philosophers to current debates on genetic screening. The historical sources of eugenics are explored next to its modern scientific foundations such as Darwinism and Mendelism. Moreover, various national contexts are highlighted in an attempt to illustrate how diverse euge...

The term ‘eugenics’, coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, refers to efforts to improve humanity through selective breeding. ‘Positive eugenics’ aims to increase the frequency of desirable traits in the population and ‘negative eugenics’ to decrease the frequency of negative ones. Although eugenics was once an international and widely supported mov...

In a lifetime of practice, most physicians will never encounter a single case of PKU. Yet every physician in the industrialized world learns about the disease in medical school and, since the early 1960s, the newborn heel stick test for PKU has been mandatory in many countries. Diane B. Paul and Jeffrey P. Brosco’s beautifully written book explains...

Robert FitzRoy, Captain of HMS Beagle and second governor of New Zealand, has two contradictory reputations among modern academics. Evolutionary biologists and Darwin scholars generally view FitzRoy as a supporter of slavery, famously quarrelling with the abolitionist Darwin over that topic during a Brazilian stopover early in the voyage of HMS Bea...

In 1960, Robert Guthrie invented a new assay to detect phenylketonuria in newborns, inspiring hope for treating mental retardation. But efforts to patent and license the test generated controversy, presaging current debates over commercialization in biomedicine. In 1960, microbiologist Robert Guthrie and technician Ada Susi invented a bacterial inh...

Although it is often taken for granted that eugenics is odious, exactly what makes it so is far from obvious. The existence of considerable interpretative flexibility is evident in the disparate policy lessons for contemporary reproductive genetics (or “reprogenetics”) that have been derived from essentially the same set of historical facts. In thi...

WeissSheila Faith, Race, hygiene and national efficiency: the eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, University of California Press, 1987, 8vo, pp. xi, 245, $43.25. - Volume 33 Issue 1 - Diane B. Paul

First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000. By KloppenburgJack BalphJr. · New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. xviii + 349 pp. Illustrations, charts, tables, notes, references, and index. $37.50. - Volume 63 Issue 4 - Diane B. Paul

About the book: Eugenic thought and practice swept the world from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century in a remarkable transnational phenomenon. Eugenics informed social and scientific policy across the political spectrum, from liberal welfare measures in emerging social-democratic states to feminist ambitions for birth control, from pu...

The naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin (1809–82) ranks as one of the most influential scientific thinkers of all time. In the nineteenth century his ideas about the history and diversity of life - including the evolutionary origin of humankind - contributed to major changes in the sciences, philosophy, social thought and religious belief. The...

PorterJene M. and PhillipsPeter W. B. (eds.), Public Science in Liberal Democracy.Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Pp. xii+343. ISBN 978-0-8020-9359-2. £45.00 (hardback). - Volume 42 Issue 1 - Diane B. Paul

Marriage between first cousins is highly stigmatized in the West and, indeed, is illegal in 31 US states. But is the hostility to such marriage scientifically well-grounded?

In this paper, we show that the question of the relative importance of innate characteristics and institutional arrangements in explaining human difference was vehemently contested in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus Sir Francis Galton's work of the 1860s should be seen as an intervention in a pre-existing controversy....

In the 1960s, patient advocacy groups were instrumental in efforts to mandate state testing of newborns for phenylketonuria (PKU), a recessively inherited disorder of phenylalanine metabolism. Advocacy groups have continued to actively lobby for the expansion of screening to other conditions detectable in newborns and, currently, for states' adopti...

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 – 1913) was one of the late nineteenth century’s most potent intellectual forces. His link to Darwin as co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection alone would have secured him a place in history, but he went on to complete work entitling him to recognition as the ‘father’ of modern biogeographical studies, as a...

It is remarkable how Darwin recognizes among beasts and plants his English society with its division of labor, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘invention,’ and the Malthusian ‘struggle for existence.’ It is Hobbes’s bellum omnium contra omnes.Karl Marx

Why did a well-intentioned effort to understand human evolution go so wrong?

That procreation is a basic human right, with which the state has no business meddling, is today the dominant view among Western genetics professionals, bioethicists, and journalists. In their perspective, reproductive genetic services should aim at increasing the choices available to women. Since no reproductive choice is right or wrong, clinician...

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77.4 (2003) 972-974 In this exhaustively researched and measured history, psychologist William Tucker traces the history of the Pioneer Fund from its founding in 1937 by textile magnate "Colonel" Wickliffe Draper to its controversial present. The circumstances of the foundation's creation, the identities of its g...

This essay uses the case of PKU as a portal through which to view shifting and contested views about genetics and reproductive behavior. In the early 1960s, the development of an effective therapy for PKU converged with the development of a test that could reliably detect the condition in newborns. As a result, infants born with the condition were...

Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 23-24 2001 Session 1: Eugenics Narrative and Reproductive Engineering

The American Journal of Bioethics 1.1 (2001) 26-27 John Robertson's case for permitting preconception sex selection (PSS) rests on a series of assumptions about the nature of liberty and of harm to others. If these assumptions (as well as empirical claims about the safety and efficacy of the procedure) are true, the conclusion that it is appropriat...

The technical fix for one genetic disorder had unforeseen repercussions.

How the term 'genetic test' is defined, matters for social policy. The past few years have witnessed many efforts to enact legal barriers specifically against genetic discrimination. To the extent that information derived from genetic tests receives special protection, both enthusiasts for genetic medicine and those who stress its perils have an in...

The bitterness and protracted character of the biometrician–Mendelian debate has long aroused the interest of historians of biology. In this paper, we focus on another and much less discussed facet of the controversy: competing interpretations of the inheritance of mental defect. Today, the views of the early Mendelians, such as Charles B. Davenpor...

In 1963, Massachusetts became the first state to initiate mandatory genetic screening of newborns for phenylketonuria (PKU), an autosomal recessive disorder whose incidence in the United States, Britain, and most of Western Europe is between 1 in 11,000 and 1 in 15,000 births.1 Although aspects of the pathogenesis and population genetics of PKU rem...

The Argument What are the aims of genetic services? Do any of these aims deserve to be labeled “eugenics”? Answers to these strenuously debated questions depend not just on the facts about genetic testing and screening but also on what is understood by “eugenics,” a term with multiple and contested meanings. This paper explores the impact of effort...

Sheldon Reed coined the expression “genetic counseling” in 1947, the same year he succeeded Clarence P. Oliver as Director of the University of Minnesota's Dight Institute for Human Genetics. In reflections written more than a quarter-century later, Reed noted that the term had occurred to him “as a kind of genetic social work without eugenic conno...

Culpability and Compassion: Lessons from the History of Eugenics - Volume 15 Issue 1 - Diane B. Paul

The early eugenicists were not stupid, but they did not share our social values. The rise and fall of the eugenics movement is a history that modern medical geneticists would do well to heed.

Newborn screening for the genetic disease phenylketonuria (PKU) is generally considered the greatest success story of applied human genetics. Paradoxically, it is invoked both by those who stress the value and those who emphasize the limitations of genetic medicine. PKU screening is often cited as a model for genetic medicine and as a precedent for...

A Review of Ecological Imperialism - - Volume 10 Issue 1 - Diane B. Paul

In 1920, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner published a study of the emotional conditioning of an 11-month old infant, “Albert B,” which was to become a textbook classic. In the late 1970s, four critical reexaminations of that study revealed both a lack of scientific merit in the original work and the evolution of fictitious embellishments of it in lat...

In 1920, John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner reported the results of an experiment with an eleven-month old infant, “Albert B” (Watson and Rayner, 1920). Their study of this single subject was methodologically flawed and produced ambiguous results. Nevertheless, it became the psychology textbook classic case of conditioned emotional responses. With t...