Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

IN THE EARLY 1900s, a French psychologist named Alfred Binet created an intelligence test. A few years later, the test was modified by a Stanford researcher and renamed the Stanford-Binet test. Now the eugenicists had a hard and fast number they could rely on: 70. They determined that anyone with an intelligence quotient (or IQ) score of less than 70 was unfit for procreation. To celebrate the moment, they created a new word: “moron,” from the Greek moros meaning “stupid” or “foolish.” Not everyone was celebrating. Walter Lippmann, a syndicated columnist, wrote in the New Republic that the IQ test represented “a new chance for quackery in a field where quacks breed like rabbits.” Most Americans, however, were excited about the chance to eliminate the least among them. And the IQ test was clear and objective, a good place to start. Lippmann’s comments were ignored. Eugenicists had completely bastardized Mendel’s laws. Although it was true that physical characteristics like eye color could be mapped to single genes, such was not the case with traits like criminality, alcoholism, epilepsy, deafness, or susceptibility to venereal diseases. Not everything could be accounted for by strict Mendelian genetics. Nonetheless, the false notion that selective breeding could make for a better society would soon allow Americans to cloak some of their worst prejudices in the gilded robes of science.