The Gene: An Intimate History

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

As Muller thought about the future of eugenics and the possibility of altering human genomes, he wondered whether Galton and his collaborators had made a fundamental conceptual error. Like Galton and Pearson, Muller sympathized with the desire to use genetics to alleviate suffering. But unlike Galton, Muller began to realize that positive eugenics was achievable only in a society that had already achieved radical equality. Eugenics could not be the prelude to equality. Instead, equality had to be the precondition for eugenics. Without equality, eugenics would inevitably falter on the false premise that social ills, such as vagrancy, pauperism, deviance, alcoholism, and feeblemindedness were genetic ills—while, in fact, they merely reflected inequality. Women such as Carrie Buck weren’t genetic imbeciles; they were poor, illiterate, unhealthy, and powerless—victims of their social lot, not of the genetic lottery. The Galtonians had been convinced that eugenics would ultimately generate radical equality—transforming the weak into the powerful. Muller turned that reasoning on its head. Without equality, he argued, eugenics would degenerate into yet another mechanism by which the powerful could control the weak.