Ideas - Eugenic thinking has never gone away

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

Eugenics is seen as a 19th-century idea put into horrific 20th-century practice. But the attraction to breeding “better” humans has a long and persistent history, says Adam Rutherford. The geneticist and science podcaster explains, in conversation with host Nahlah Ayed. *This episode originally aired on January 20, 2023.

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Reproductive control. It's a term that sounds medical. You might think of contraception or fertility treatment. But historically, reproductive control refers to something more specific and sinister. Eugenics. Eugenics began as one man's theory of population control, developed in Victorian England. His view, that the best of humanity should reproduce more. more, and the lessers less.

Best was a relative idea. The strategy was explicitly racist, designed to breed away characteristics seen then as hereditary traits, poverty, criminality, disability. Still, eugenic thinking crossed the ocean and became all too popular among North Americans in the opening decades of the 1900s. Early supporters included many influential figures,

like politicians right across political lines. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Canadian socialist Tommy Douglas. Eugenic laws were established in certain American states and Canadian provinces, and sterilization policies followed. More than 2,800 young Albertans were legally sterilized between 1928 and 1972. Leiloni-Mure and Glenn Sinclair were two of them. They had been declared mentally defective.

at Alberta's provincial training school in the 1950s. From the film documentary, surviving eugenics. The eugenics board had to give approval. Five minutes in their office and we were out of there. It took five minutes for them to decide to wreck our lives. I thought that we were having a pandemic up. Eugenic laws in North America provided the model for a similar one imposed by Germany's Third Reich in 1933.

on the brutal road to the atrocities of World War II and the Holocaust. So eugenics would seem to be a lesson from the 20th century, learned in the most brutal way. And yet, knowledge of eugenics may be fading, while the echoes of its ideas remain. You can hear them in the chance of today's white supremacists. You will not replace us! You will not replace us!

You will not replace us! You will not replace us! See them in our lives. allegations of medical abuse. A new Quebec study documents the cases of 22 indigenous women who say they underwent imposed sterilization between 1980 and 2019. The specter of eugenics also haunts debates around gene editing. Chinese biophysicist Ha Jean-Qui, working largely in secret, had used CRISPR-to-knocked to knock out a gene called CCR-5 in two early human embryos, then returned the embryos to

their mother's womb. But the scientific community did not cheer. The reaction was shock and condemnation. This is kind of the motivation for writing this book at this time. Someone said to me, why are you writing about eugenics? That's history. And I think that it's not because the word eugenics became toxic, but the mode of thinking does not. The same conversations that are happening in 2020 were happening in 1920, the only differences, we're now talking about gene engineering and gauze. and things like that, but the motivation remains the same. My name is Dr. Adam Rutherford, and I am a geneticist and science communicator. He's the author of a new book on the dark history and troubling present of eugenics.

It's called Control. Adam Rutherford is a lecturer in biology and society at University College London, an institution once associated with Francis Galton, the very thinker who coined the term eugenics. I spoke to Adam Rutherford, who takes a wry view of his connection to Francis Galton. He's been a constant presence in my entire academic life. And I think one of the most sort of circular,

I think it's kind of amusing as well things, is that my salary is actually paid by the legacy fund that he set up when he died in 1911. to promote the study of eugenics. And here I am paid by the same money to do, well, quite the opposite. There is justice in the world. If there's a buzzing noise, that's Francis Galton spinning in his grave. Can you describe how your professional life intersected with the father of eugenics?

Basically, I went up to University College London in 1994, so 20-something years. years ago. And I initially went to study medicine, but then I transferred to genetics. It was just a subject that suited me much better. And at that time, the laboratory in which the genetics department was housed at University College London was called the Galton, the Galton Laboratory, and it was named after Francis Galton. Now, in the initial lectures, we did talk about the legacy and the work of Francis Galton, this 19th century polymath, and he's the half-cousin of Charles Darwin, and he's a really significant player in the history of science. But I have to confess at the age of 18 or 19, it really didn't, you know, his more pernicious

views and the views about eugenics, what I've ended up devoted my career to talking about, wasn't a big part of my undergraduate life. Tell us about Galton. It's not a household name. Yeah, he's a fascinating character, and he's one of those sort of independently wealthy gentleman of science of 19th century Victorian Britain. He comes from an extremely high-achieving family. His father died when he was relatively young,

and he went on travels around mostly to Africa and wrote a best-selling book about travels in Africa. But Mark Twain wrote that travel expands the mind and helps you be more liberal about your fellow humans around the world. For Galton, it had the opposite effect. He came back an extreme racist, an extreme white supremacist for his age, not just to. which is not just with the benefit of 21st century hindsight, but relatively for the Victorian era.

And I characterise him as sort of an early data bro, a sort of tech, ultra-systemizing brain. He's obsessed with numbers and statistics and thinks that you can answer questions, sort of esoteric questions, vague questions, by using statistics, by using numbers. His catchphrase was, whenever you can count. But he was a bonafide scientist. I guess so. I mean, the word scientist doesn't even really come into use until 1834, and we're talking about the 1850s and 60s here. So he's a polymath more than anything. So he invents statistical techniques to process his attempts to understand how society is structured. He does loads of other stuff. The legacy of Galton is absolutely incredible. He invented the weather map. He invented the dog whistle, which again, I think, think is quite amusing because since dog whistle has become a sort of code word for covert racism and he was an extreme overt racist, he actually invented the literal dog whistle. Loads of other things, he was very instrumental in determining that fingerprints are not heritable, that they are unique

to individuals. And that became a sort of fundamental basis for forensic fingerprinting that we still use today. So his intellectual legacy is absolutely colossal, but the thing that we'll be talking about and the thing that he's most significantly remembered for is that in attempting to apply statistics to population control, he comes up with the word eugenics and also the sort of intellectual and scientific framework for this idea, which becomes, I argue, one of the dominant ideas of the 20th century. Could you just give us a sense of what it was precisely that Galton wanted to do in terms of population control? What was his ideal scenario? Yeah, so it's an older idea that populations,

that society can be improved by selective breeding. It starts really with Plato, talking about how high-quality men should be matched with high-quality women at marriage festivals. And with that, you would maintain high-quality children and different stratification within society. And we think this type of idea has existed in pretty much every culture for,

the whole of human history. And it goes alongside the practice of infanticide as well, so that the killing of babies deemed unworthy. And we also think that that is pretty much universal in every society as well. By the time you get to the 18th and 19th century, you've got people like Thomas Malthus talking about population control through, well, various, various means, but it's all, it's rather unscientific, it's un-numerical as well. When Golton comes along, his understanding of of his cousin's ideas about evolution, about natural selection, an artificial selection, which effectively is agriculture and breeding, and says, well, if humans are evolved, as per Darwinian evolution, then why can't we apply the same sort of techniques, selective breeding,

to improve, I'm kind of doing air quotes for the listeners, but to improve the quality of a people, of the British people, because he's a British guy at the time. And so he sort of drops this in at exactly the right time for the global west and the global north, where there's huge colonial expansion, and there's huge problems with immigration, and it's a big societal issues. We're in the wake of the industrial revolution, so cities have expanded, there's a much more visible pore, and Galton comes along and says,

well, you know what we should do, we should improve the quality of society, but not by these old-fashioned archaic methods, but using this new evolutionary science. So it starts off as a good thing. It always starts off as a positive idea. The word that he comes up with, eugenics, is sort of derived from, it's a portmanteau of Greek meaning you, you meaning good and genics meaning sort of born. So it's like, you know, well born. We want people to be well born. And it really becomes a mainstream idea. You know, the ideas that gotten formulated really took off, as you say, in the 19th and 20th century. And the people who believed in it and backed this idea were not outliers. Who did they include? Well, everyone, pretty much. It's not universally supported, and I guess we'll come on to that in a minute, but it's across the political spectrum.

This type of idea is, we typically think of it as being associated with, you know, really pernicious atrocities, genocides associated with the Nazis. And so it's often discussed or often thought of as being a very right-wing philosophy. And it certainly was in the late 19th and early 20th century, but it was also incredibly well supported on the socialist left as well, particularly in the UK when it was developing as an idea. The founders of left-wing politics in the 20th century were ardent eugenicists as well to improve the stock of the British people.

The normalisation of these types of ideas, and ideas that we find so toxic today is always astonishing to me that they're just considered to be desirable practices, desirable policies, to the extent that it infiltrates every tier of culture and society. You include a chilling excerpt from a letter from a young D.H. Lawrence in your book, where he fantasizes about leading the sick, the halt, and the maimed into a lethal chamber. Oh, God, isn't it the worst? It's so shocking. He was young then. He was in his 20s.

Weirdly, it's in a letter, effectively a love letter to someone he was trying to woo. you know, maybe romance was different in those days, I have no idea. But you could get Valentine's cards, which were eugenics themed as well. You know, here is my goodly heritage, and therefore, you know, can I woo you? And so it wasn't the toxic idea that we think of it today. There were charlatans and sort of snake oil salesmen as well that sold eugenic shampoo or eugenic face cream or all sorts of things like that. But I can never quite get my head around as a sort of historian.

how this incredibly toxic idea was so universally supported just a century ago. Were there any critics at the time of the idea? They certainly were, but they were a vocal minority. The story in the UK is interesting because it's dominated by the writer G.K. Chesterton, who is a sort of comic playwrights and poet and novel writer. But he was a Catholic. a pretty strict Catholic and a Christian apologist. And he campaigned tirelessly against eugenics,

against the political normalization and the policies of eugenics, on the grounds that I think accurately, he identified that the targets of eugenics policies, which often had these sort of vague, pseudo-psychiatric terms like feeble-minded or imbeciles, but also were things like epilepsy or iterant alcoholism or women with menstrual troubles or broad racialized groups. You know, in the UK it was Slavic people or the Irish.

In the Americas, it was more indigenous people or First Nations people and immigrants, which also were Slavs and Irish, but from Europe. And what Chesterton said, what he identified was that these specific groupings, which are people who should be targeted for eugenics sterilization, actually really is just a, they're just the poor. right? So the eugenics was always the powerful and the wealthy targeting the poor. And this ties into another broad theme of eugenics at this time, which is emerging, which we now call the Great Replacement Theory, the idea that the existing population, and note that I didn't say indigenous population,

but the existing population has become decadent and is not having enough children to replace themselves. and instead immigrants or undesirable people are coming and they are much more fertile and they're having too many children. And this is a, it's an idea which predates eugenics. You know, it's one described in some of the classic analysis of the fall of Rome, Gibbon in particular. It's eternal. It's an idea which we still talk about today. It comes up in the manifestos of various shooters around the world and various politicians today as well. It's never been shown to be the case. It's never been shown to be the case. It's simply not true. But it's right there in the core of this political ideology.

These ideas weren't just ideas. They actually became reality in the early 20th century in North America. Could you talk about some of the medical or the main medical scientific or legal acts that were taking place in the U.S. in support of eugenics or eugenic ideas? Yeah. So the first sort of, the first semblance of eugenic type ideas occurs in the late 19th century. true, but they're not very, in a few states, and they're not very well-defined, but their attempts to get people of desirable qualities, meaning descended from white Europeans, to breed with each other,

with ideas of racial purity in mind. But by the time eugenics has become a sort of formal idea, and this is particularly derived from one man and one body, a guy called Charles Davenport, who met Francis Galton, the person we started with, at the end of the the 19th century and came back to America with a sort of religious fervor associated with this idea. By 1907, you get the first state legislation in Indiana for the Enforced sterilization of people deemed undesirable. And it's, again, broad categories, feeble-minded is one of the main defining aspects of it. It's a really quick transfer ideas for the time, isn't it? It's astonishing. And this isn't in any way apologizing or trying to exonerate the British

for this. But in the UK where we come up with the idea, particularly via Galton, we never actually get this on the legislation, on the books. Despite Winston Churchill's best efforts. Despite Winston Churchill's best efforts. And in fact, Churchill was influenced significantly by an Indiana doctor, I called Sharp, who is, I guess best described as an enthusiastic vasectomy practiser. He claimed he could do 300 a day with no anaesthetic. It's not an idea I want to think about too much. But Churchill read this pamphlet by this guy sharp, and Churchill takes that idea and tries to bring it to Parliament on at least three occasions in legislation.

He's a young MP at this point, and he proposed in drafted legislation that never became law, sterilising men and women using, well, he describes it as Roentgen-rays. And of course, Rundgen-rays are X-rays. They'd only been discovered a few years earlier in the 1890s. But he was the most politically active supporter of eugenics in the UK. And that's not a very well-known fact, is it? No, I mean, it's a hard conversation to have in the UK.

People have such a passionate, patriotic view of Churchill, who did great things as a wartime leader, and undeniably so. But there's a fierce conversation in the UK discourse, particularly in the press, that if you criticise Churchill, that you're part of some sort of, sort of politically correct conspiracy. But the truth is that Churchill was an extreme racist. So he expressed racist views throughout his life. He embraced eugenics as a political ideology to be imposed upon on the people

with unmatched enthusiasm amongst the British political class. But he did drop it. I mean, by 1914, when the war started, he basically expressed no interest on the subject ever again. That doesn't mean that we didn't have eugenics types policies in the UK. We didn't have it in the UK, but in North America, particularly in the US, they really embraced it full, full-throatedly. It's spread quite widely. Who was funding eugenics-based research? Yeah, in the US, I mean, it's a fascinating sort of jazz age story this, because I mentioned Charles Davenport, and he's part of the sort of East Coast academic set. He was at Harvard, and then

And he set up the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor, where there still is one of the great genetics laboratories, one of the best in the world. But he had taught a young woman called Mary Harriman Rumsey, who was the daughter of the railroad magnate, E.H. Ramsey, who had died. But his wife, Mary Rumsey, her mother, was the richest woman in America. And Davenport was introduced to her, and she funded a lot of the last. alongside Rockefeller and Carnegie, they were the three main funders. They funded at Charles Davenport's bequest. They funded the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor from 1907 until 1938, so right up against the beginning of the Second World War.

And again, these are names that are well respected, as you say. I mean, the Carnegie, who's built libraries in some of the smallest towns across North America. Yeah, it's part of the emerging philanthropy culture of North America. And eugenics wasn't their primary concern. They were funding all sorts of health and social interventions. But it indicates how normalized eugenics was. Enforced sterilization was as part of medical outreach. In order to treat the people and improve public health,

enforced sterilization of those deemed unworthy of their own reproductive rights was that was just normal stuff. and particularly a normal conversation for the American aristocrats. So those East Coast people who are part of the, they're the model on which the Gatsby characters are based because Fitzgerald was aware of them. He knew those, he knew the Rumsies, he knew the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's, and he gives those roles to people like Tom Buchanan

in the Great Gatsby, who's a grotesque and odious figure. And he, right at the beginning, expresses, straight up Great Replacement Theory, saying, he's quoting a popular science book that he's read. This is Fitzgerald criticizing these buffoons by giving the most odious views to the most odious character, which is Tom Buchanan. But it's right there as the sort of normalized conversation that's happening amongst these East Coast aristocrats. So that's one form of pushback. Are there any others that you're aware of? And in that era in North America? A lot of them come from the,

from the science itself. So people like Charles Davenport were obsessed with a particular form of inheritance, which we called Mendelian. You learn about how genetics works by studying Mendel, the European monk friar, they're slightly different, who did his pea plant experiments. And he bred thousands of pea plants together. And with that established that there were these units of inheritance that were passed from generation to generation. And with maths and stats, you could predict what generation would have particular, what characteristics would appear in various generations. Mendel did those experiments in the 1860s, but they were only translated into English in 1900. This version of genetics, which is correct, gave the eugenics movement an incredible boost,

because all of a sudden they had the genes themselves. They had these units of inheritance. And it was Davenport who first describes the inheritance of eye color, blue and brown eyes. It was Davenport, who first describes ginger hair is a recessive trait. It's Davenport who first discovers that Huntington's disease, the pattern of inheritance is Mendelian in Huntington's disease. All of these happening in the first decade of the 20th century over at Cold Spring Harbor. The first problem is that with the 21st century view of genetics, we know that those models are incredibly simplistic.

And really, although we teach genetics like this, they don't really explain human variation. They don't really explain eye color at all. The other problem is that alongside these traits like eye color and hair color and diseases like Huntington's disease, Davenport also asserted that the pattern of inheritance for all sorts of human behaviors, diseases and characteristics was basically the same.

So there was a gene for seafaringness, but also sort of sexual preferences and laziness and, you know, things that we now know are hugely complex But no, it was a gene for everything. And the reason he wanted that is because if it's as simple as that, you can plot things on a family tree, and you've got a fulcrum on which actual sterilization or eugenics policies can be enacted.

Now, you asked me about the dissenters. The dissenters actually came from within the scientific community. So key founders of genetics in America, people like Thomas Hunt Morgan at New York, actually pointed out that the stats weren't very good, that what Davenport was publishing was just pretty bad science and that these characteristics are obviously not inherited in this very straightforward Mendelian way.

So using them as a basis for policy was folly. Geneticist Adam Rutherford. You're listening to Ideas and an episode about the past and present of eugenic thinking. That's the subject of Adam Rutherford's latest book, Control. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada across North America on Sirius XM in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca.ca.com. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayed. Canada's indigenous stories aren't just being told. They're being reclaimed. Join through the history of words in telling our twisted histories, join the vibrant weekly conversations on Unreserved. Uvalonid, Uqa, Uqa, Uriqa, Uriqa, Inuit, Unikang, Tutsasaw Kattelmil, plus experience investigations that refuse to be forgotten, like Cooper Island and missing and murdered. Listen to the full collection now, wherever you get your podcast. Adam Rutherford is passionate about science. He believes in it.

He's a lecturer in genetics. He hosts a BBC science podcast with colleague Hannah Fry. Now, this is an interesting one. Hannah, what do you see if I ask you to conjure up an image? And he writes popular books about science. Most recently, two opinionated books about science, race, and reproductive control. Hi, I'm Dr. Adam Rutherford. I'm the author of How to Ague with a Racist. This is my new book.

It's called Control. It's an examination of how science can be twisted into dark ideologies and how an esoteric academic idea grew from the chat in the salons of Victorian gentlemen scientists all the way to the gates of Auschwitz. He argues that scientists are part of society, human, flawed, and not always above the politics and prejudices of their time. Biology as an academic discipline emerges out of the political ideology. of European colonial expansion, and the racial categories that we use today are invented in service of that political ideology.

So the roots of all biology are, in fact, entwined with scientific racism. And you get the same thing that happening again in the 19th century with genetics. Genetics emerges out of and in service of the political ideology of eugenics. As we've heard, the eugenic population control theories of Victorian polymath, Francis Galton had the veneer of scientific thought. They met up with the political and social anxieties of the early 20th century, and in parts of Canada and the U.S., they became policy. Hundreds of thousands of vulnerable and racialized people were legally subjected to forced sterilization. Those laws were a template for those of the Third Reich, history tells us,

and yet, even that horror was not enough to kill off you'd thinking once and for all, as you'll hear in the second half of our conversation about Adam Rutherford's book, Control, the Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. What happens in the 19th and the 20th century is that science is co-opted into this mindset using the Galton's neologism of eugenics. And people with that particular mindset leap on it. And And this happens over and over again in history, right? Science, new scientific research, politicians or campaigners or ideologues, use the science as a crutch to support their pre-existing ideologies.

The word eugenics became toxic and the industrial practice of it, particularly in Nazi Germany and to a lesser extent in America in the USA, goes away, wanes. But the mode of thinking does not. and enforced sterilization continue in America and Canada and all around the world in India and the two most populous countries, China and India, they continue to this day.

So with the new techniques in genetics, which expose a better understanding of how human genetics works, but also the possibility of altering our genes, It doesn't keep me up at night that this is going to be widespread practice, because these are technologies which are not very available, you know, they're available to only the rich and in wealthy countries. But they give the ideology a huge boost. And what was striking to me is that the idea never goes away,

but the same conversations that are happening in 2020 were happening in 1920, the only differences we're now talking about gene, engineering and polygenic scores and things like that. But the motivation remains the same. How did eugenics advocacy in the West change in the decades after the atrocities of World War II when those came to light? Yeah, it was a great question. And the answer is disappointingly slowly. There was still remain great support for eugenics in the years after the war, but it was waning. The Americans pulled the plug on funding eugenics research in the years running up to the war, and Rockefeller did pull funding from the Eugenics Records Office,

and I think it's 38 from memory. After the war, you see the eugenics organizations, laboratories, journals, and societies dwindling. And in the scientific context, it's not so much they dwindling, but they mutate. They evolve into genetics departments. Now, I'm not saying that in a conspiratorial way or a, oh my God, genetics labs around the world are actually eugenics labs. They're not. But a lot of eugenics in the lab was simply trying to understand human inheritance.

So the framework, the basis of understanding disease genetics and behavior genetics often came out of labs that 20 or 30 years earlier were called eugenics laboratories. And mine is no different. Again, not trying to exonerate this behavior, but... Eugenics was part of the Cold Spring Harbor, which is now the best genetics lab on Earth. My department, the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London, is a direct descendant from the Eugenics Laboratory, founded by Galton in 1904. And we see that pattern all over the world.

So the rejection of eugenics as an idea is, it definitely happens, but the mindset persists. the word becomes toxic, but the ideas that underlie it remain present. And sterilization continues right up until our present days, almost. Not even almost, yeah. So that's a shocking thing. The numbers are significantly lower, but there's, we think that there were enforced sterilization in America happening in the dozens, and maybe the few dozens, 20s in ICE detention centers in the last couple of years, there is an ongoing class action.

in Canada. I think it's exclusively First Nations women who were coercibly sterilized as recently as 2018, I think it is. And then there's, you know, we don't really know what's happening in China. In India, the most common form of contraception in women of reproductive age is long-term or permanent sterilization. Now, are these things eugenics? I don't know. It becomes a semantic argument, I think. Are they attempts to remove the reproductive rights of individual citizens? Absolutely. Who do they happen to most often? Racialized minorities or the very poorest members of society.

So again, the mindset's the same, even if the numbers are not the 20th century genocides. I studied genetics when I was at university. That's my degree. Oh, I did not know that? Yes. Exciting. way. It was a long time ago, but it's still very much a topic of interest for me. But I don't remember hearing the word eugenics until, I don't know, year three. And it was then that, you know,

I was able to start looking into the ethics, the ethical side. Just how well known would you say, having, you being a popularizer of science, how well do you think the rest of society, beyond geneticists actually know about eugenics and the history of it? I think almost none. I think it's very surprising that it's a word that I think many people are not familiar with. So the book before this, which you mentioned, was about race science and similar sorts of ideas, but really focused on race. Now, the way I gauge this sometimes is by talking to my editor about what the title should be. And titles are really important.

I don't think they necessarily convey what's in the book. But selling a book about the history of genetics and biology with a reference frame of scientific racism is easy because you call it something like How to Ague with a Racist and people know exactly what you're talking about immediately. Actually, it's quite a serious book about population genetics and the history of this field. So, you know, but you can't call a book Population, Genetics, and the History of Scientific Racism if you want it, you want your children to eat.

But when we came to talking about the title of for the eugenics book, we struggled for a long time because you say eugenics to most people and they go, don't know what that is. Is there some irony in the fact that that is the case that most people don't know what eugenics is? And yet we kind of swim in those waters. I mean, we are when the human genome project, you know, the sequencing of the gene, was going on, we regularly as geneticists talked about the possibility of designer babies or, you know, perfecting the human race. And now it's actually, it is actually in the water. I mean, how concerned are you that we may be kind of just slipping into a eugenic mindset without actually defining what it is? Yeah, I'm genuinely concerned about that. I think that the commercial genetic tests, companies like 23M and me and ancestry don't.

common and so on. When people have spent decades trying to teach people to move away from this deterministic view that genetics determines what you are. And in the Mendelian view, you have a specific gene and that is what you're going to be. And it's part of our language, right? It's just a normal part of cultural discourse. People say, Christiana Ronaldo is the gene for playing football or whatever. Obviously, things are way more complex than that. And there are hundreds of genes involved in those types of behaviours, but also there's the environment, how you're raised, everything that isn't genetic. Nature versus nurture, a phrase coined by Francis Galton.

But I think that sort of mindset is so normalized in society that was really pushing against the tide. Something happened in the 2000s, which was the advent of these ancestry testing kits. and I don't think any of us anticipated that that was going to end up being maybe the most significant way that non-geneticists, non-biologists would engage with genetics. Most people are doing this because it's fun, right? Because they want to find out some fun stuff. All white people want to find out they're descended from Vikings, because Vikings were cool.

I used to get dozens of letters a week saying, I've done one of these tests, and it says I'm descended from Vikings. You know what? Everyone's a descendant from Vikings. It really doesn't make you special. And then in America it's a different story because, well, a lot of people want to be, actually now want to be descended from First Nations or indigenous people. And that's a huge political nightmare. Absolutely.

There are companies out there that you can spit in a tube and people will tell you that you're from one particular tribe and therefore give you a certificate, which does that have any legal value? It certainly doesn't have any science. scientific value, because there isn't a tribe in Canada or America that uses genetic ancestry testing for tribal membership. So our work is never going to be done, because I think it's part of, it's very much part of the human condition to look at our ancestry, to look back to our ancestors, and try from

that to extract some sort of meaning and belonging in our own life. And one of the strange things about genetics, the relationship between your genes and what you actually are is far less robust than what most people think. Yeah. The other thing about human nature is that we tend to repeat things. History tends to repeat itself, as we always say. We are living in a time, unfortunately, where there's resentment of migrants, you know, and the poor, there's racism, replacement theory has probably never been flourished as it has today. Do you think that eugenic thinking underpins some of that, or has it gone underground? Is there a relationship between all that and where we are with that? kind of thinking. It's almost the other way around, is that that type of thinking is permanent, and it feeds into what becomes a sort of gestalt way of thinking, which is the eugenics mindset. So there's elements to it, which is great replacement theory. There's elements to it, which are scientific racism. There's a lot of classism and ableism, which are inherent in eugenics as well. Then there's the idea of that genetic determinism, which in humans is sometimes

expressed as the sort of racehorse theory. Donald Trump used to talk about good genes, the racehorse theory that he comes from good genetic stock. And so my concern is when politicians, writers and opinion leaders are adopting these kind of ideas, just like Tom Buchanan did and Gatsby, and saying, this is what we should do. This is why we should close the borders, or this is why we should have more IQ-type testing for minority groups. Or this is why we should sterilize this group of people, because the science says that it will improve the quality of society. The science doesn't say that, and it never has said that. So the fight for me, as a scientist, is that you can't have my tools to justify your bigotry. As happened in the past.

We talk about the idea of designer babies, but you said eugenics was an attempt to improve public health, initially anyway, something we're surely going to be tempted to do, and we are doing in the most effective way possible. And you talk in the book about how parents are compelled, of course, to do the best for their children. Is it crazy to be worried that eugenic thinking might come into play for governments around that idea of improving public health, that we might try to make babies resistant to disease, for example. From a scientific point of view, I think that the types of interventions which are based on genetics, based on our current understanding and our techniques available to us, are still in the realms of the future at best and possibly science fiction,

which doesn't mean that governments aren't thinking about it. We are now capable of looking at the genomes of anyone, babies, even embryos, and making predictions, probabilistic predictions, about what their characteristics will be like, but they are probabilistic and that's really important. I take the view that we actually know how to improve society. We know how to make better members of society already. We tend to do it, or the sort of things with the proven track record are things like good public health policy

or free school meals for people who are in the lowest socioeconomic category, good access to sport and health, reading programs for young kids. I mean, the correlation between academic success and whether your parents read to you as a baby is huge. And so I'm not, I'm a scientist, I'm a geneticist, and this is the life I've committed to, and I'm in service of science and science. to improve the quality of humankind.

I just don't think that the interventions that are being speculated about are the best ways to do that. Maybe they will be in the future. So I'm just anxious. I'm just anxious that the same thing happens. As you said, history repeats itself. Actually, do you know what? I said that the other day to a historian,

and he corrected me and said, history doesn't repeat itself. People repeat history. And it's an interesting distinction, isn't it? I think part of the conversation has to be led by geneticists, has to be led by scientists. You know, scientists generally think of themselves as being apolitical or above politics, but I don't think that's good enough. I think we have to know our own history and to see how the science of human biology,

human inheritance, genetics and evolution has been used in the past for political ideologies as a means of saying, well, like I said a minute ago, you can't have my toys. to justify your bigotry. But yeah, I once described eugenics as bigotry dressed up as biology. And I think that's true to this day. And I think we need to be wary of that in the future. With all of that in mind, let's go back to how you open your book, which is an incident that happened in 2018,

the controversy around an unethical experiment where embryos were edited at the genetic level, presumably with the idea, or the idea was to make these children HIV resistant. It was a failed experiment and the scientists went to jail. But is that the kind of intervention that you still worry about? Is it still a continuing concern in the scientific community that this was not an isolated incident? I'm fairly confident that it was not an isolated incident. So this is the story of Haygen-Kwey, who in 2018 announced proudly to the world that he had

genetically edited by using this relatively new technique called CRISPR. Two babies during the IVF process to introduce a mutation in a particular gene called CCR5 to make them, as you say, resistant to HIV infection. Now, by his own admission, the gene edits that have been planned, because there is a version of this gene, CCR5, that is naturally occurring, and people with two copies of that version are immune to HIV infection. and the father of the two girls was HIV positive. And in China, HIV has huge social stigma associated with it

in the same way that it did in the UK in the early 80s. And I'm guessing the same in North America. I don't know that area as civil world. So he was trying to do something good. His motivation was to help these parents to give immunity to HIV infection to these two unborn girls. They were. In fact, in 2018, he announced their birth.

The timeline of these events, I start the book because actually, you're speaking to me from my bedroom and it's exactly over there when I woke up at one morning. I think from memory, I think it was a Monday morning. And my phone was just,

I had dozens of messages and dozens of texts saying, you need to speak to me now. What the hell's going on? loads of press people calling me up, and it's because this guy had announced this. Because of the time difference between Hong Kong where this announcement was made at a big reproductive genetics conference and the UK, I'd slept through this and working up to these messengers, for the first several hours, the Chinese press was hailing him as a genius,

and a future Nobel Prize-winning genius alongside the, you know, the people who invented IDF in the first place. and then when they gauge the international reaction as it spread around the world, which was utter horror, an illegal experiment, not a health intervention, it's an experiment. And like I said, by his own admission, the gene edits didn't work. So he introduced these edited versions of these genes that were unknown to nature or science. And he put them back in the embryos and back into the mother, and they were born. Sorry, Lulu and Nana.

And then later we discovered there was a third girl called Amy, who was also born. And those headlines, the Chinese headlines pronouncing Hejanquay, a genius, vanished. They no longer exist, and there's no trace of them. And then there was universal condemnation. Hejanquay did go to prison for three years. He's now out. Wow. We found out a few months ago.

He's out. Back to the lab? He's out. And he's back in the lab. And we're not quite sure what he's doing. he's talking about gene therapy and you know that story is ongoing it was an isolated incident

but I don't think it shows that technology even though it failed the technology is relatively straightforward is the wrong way to describe it but he's combining two things the IVF process and embryo selection which has been around since the 19 late 70s early 80s

with new techniques in genetic engineering which are I mean they're specialist but there are literally probably tens or, if not hundreds of thousands of people around the world who are capable of doing it. We do it in undergraduate classes. It won't be long before we'll be doing it in school classes, because as with all technologies, technological developments, the point is to normalize them to make them easy to do. But he's combining them into a thing which is ethically, extremely dubious, scientifically still not, I mean, easy to do, but not. It's not

like, you know, hammering a nail and actually illegal as well. So if there's one positive thing that comes out of that story is that the international community was alerted to this and was after a few hours universal and condemning it. Where is or where should this ethical conversation be happening? Everywhere. It has to involve expertise from. scientists, from doctors, from geneticists, from reproductive health experts, patient advocacy groups as well, this is really important. But it has to be happening in society. Scientists are

members of society and they shouldn't and don't get to make decisions. That's how democracy's work. My work, all of my work outside of academia, in sort of public communication of science, and genetics in particular, is that the conversations we have in society are informed, that they are not in the fantasy realms of science fiction, which I'm a big science fiction fan, love science fiction, but the conversations about genetics and in science fiction are not where the lab is, what we're actually capable of.

But also that when ideologues on the political left or right, as has historically been the case with eugenics, begin to lean on new scientific techniques to promote their ideas, that the demos, that the people are equipped with the real science, to say, well, actually, what you've just said is not, that isn't possible. You're talking about a genetic intervention, which we don't understand yet. And again, that's the point I made earlier about, you know, you spend 30 years doing this and having a really sophisticated understanding

of genetics and the best conclusion I can come up with for most genotes. We don't know how eye color works at a genetic level. We don't know that. We teach it to 16-year-olds using this model. Brown is dominant over blue, blah, blah, blah. You've just passed high school biology. We don't really know how that works at all. And if I don't, if I'm saying that,

if I'm saying that the simplest model of genetic inheritance in humans, as a professional geneticist is something we don't really understand, If you genuinely got politicians talking about intelligence, selecting or gene editing for intelligence at a population level, they're in la la land. They're in scientific la la land before we even start talking about the ethics. So my goal is to raise the level of literacy, scientific literacy, so that society decides what we do with these technologies. And you were doing that at a time, you know, and you've written this critique at a time when mistrust in science is probably, again, one of the highest in human history. Where's the line between critiquing science and putting trust in it?

Ah, man, if I knew the answer to that. We've got a paper coming out, which I'll be, you know, pushing out all over my social media, and hopefully we'll make it into the press, where we actually asked that question in a quantitative way and based it around the pandemic. So we conducted a large survey and asked,

we're basically trying to find out if the pandemic and the various aspects, remember the time a couple of years ago, everyone started talking about PCR and exponential growth curves and R numbers. And so the question that emerged out of that is, well, has scientific literature specifically about genetics, has that improved? How has it changed during the pandemic?

Now, spoiler alert, it has. But what we have found effectively a Dunning Kruger effect, which is that people who are ignorant of a subject tend to be more confident about it. And that what we've actually seen is a polarization. So trust in science, the people who who had extreme views about science, either trust or not, or suspicion, that during the pandemic, that those views have been amplified. So people who had trust in science are now more trustworthy of science, and people who are suspicious of science are now more suspicious of it. So, you know, as ever with scientists, I have to say, I don't know what you do with that information. I don't know what happens next. Probably more follow-up studies to try and understand it.

But, you know, you can't separate this out from society. And the mechanisms by which information has disseminated are very different today. You know, it's an ongoing conversation about social media that we know has the effect of amplifying extreme views, but also giving a platform to fringe views. I actually think that trust in science is pretty good. If any of your listeners have any doubt, vaccines are the single most effective intervention, medical intervention in human history with the point. possible exception of sterilization of water, right? The vaccines are safe. They've been tested billions of times and they are safe. Public service announcement there. Sorry. Yeah, people will complain and I'm sure they will, but that's my stance on that. I think that most people do have

trust in science and will get vaccinated as soon as they can because they are safe and we've got these mechanisms that test these things. Science is a self-correcting endeavor, but only when humans self-corrected. You've been listening to my conversation with Adam Rutherford. He's a geneticist, BBC Radio and podcast host, and Science Communicator. His latest book is called Control, The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. Find more information on our website, cbcbc.com.ca.com This episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Web producer for Ideas is Lisa Ayuso. Danielle Duval is our technical producer.

Ideas Senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.