Vinoth Ramachandra

Easter Sunday is an appropriate day to be reflecting on the meaning of one’s life and what we will be remembered for- and by whom- once we shuffle off these mortal coils.

I’ve been watching the film “Living” (2022). It stars one of my favourite British actors, Bill Nighy, in a role perfectly suited to his customary soft-spoken, melancholy demeanour. Nighy plays a senior civil servant in the London of the 1950s, a creature of routine rather than reflection or action, whose childhood ambition rose no higher than to be a respectable “gentleman” of predictable habit. One day he receives a terminal health diagnosis from his doctor and the rest of the film deals with how he handles the last six months of his life. It is slow-paced, and the dialogue, while subtle, doesn’t sparkle. But it holds one’s attention throughout, as do all good works of art, by its understated, nuanced quality. The silences and facial expressions are more pregnant with meaning than the typical chatter of Hollywood.

The film is a loose adaptation of the Japanese classic “Ikuru”, and the screenplay was written by the Japanese-born British Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro whose novel “Remains of the Day” also deals with another emotionally repressed white Englishman of an earlier era (the ritualized handling of emotional disturbance, including not expressing grief publicly, seems to unite feudal Japanese and English cultures).

Staying with films, let’s put the clock back twenty five years. In the brave new world of “Gattaca” (1997), one of the most thought-provoking science fiction films, the earth belongs to those humans who have been engineered genetically to high IQs and long lifespans. They form the elite “valids”. The “in-valids” are those conceived by natural means and are a menial underclass. Vincent is an “in-valid” because he was born in the old-fashioned way, and his genetic tests show he has bad eyesight, heart problems and a life expectancy of about 30 years. He works as a cleaner in the space centre. Aspiring to join an expedition to one of the moons of Saturn, Vincent rebels against the system. Using an illegal DNA broker, he gets a new biological identity from a “valid” who has been paralyzed in an accident.

I learn from the IMDB website that “When Gattaca was first released, as part of a marketing campaign there were adverts for people to call and have their children genetically engineered. Thousands of people called, wanting to have their offspring genetically engineered.”

If “Living” raises the question whether there is more to life than merely occupying a place in space and time, “Gattaca” openly confronts the question, “Who has the right to decide which life is not worth living?”

The twentieth century began with the auspicious discovery of genetic inheritance by the Moravian biologist Gregor Mendel. He supplied the mechanism of inheritance that was missing in Darwin’s theory of “descent by modification”. Mendel’s work was seized upon by a breed of Social Darwinists who were eager to apply the new ideas of inheritance and the “survival of the fittest’ (a term coined by Herbert Spencer, not Darwin) to their dream of perfecting human societies by weeding out those who were “undesirable” in the way that animal breeders had been doing for centuries. (Infanticide of unwanted babies and restricting the reproductive rights of certain classes of humans have long been practised in many cultures.)

It was in the US that the new vision of Eugenics flourished. Doctors began sterilizing poor blacks, the mentally infirm, those deemed sexual deviants, recidivist criminals. The majority of states had coercive sterilization on their books for most of the 20th century, and somewhere between 70,000 to the highest estimates of 400,000 people were sterilized against their will or knowledge. New terms such as “feeble-mindedness”, “moron”, “imbecile” were given a pseudo-scientific status as ways to classify human intelligence. Many of the major universities in the US included a eugenics course in their curriculum.

From the US eugenics spread to Britain. It was embraced by intellectuals and politicians across the political spectrum, from the conservative Winston Churchill to the socialist George Bernard Shaw. Notable members of the British Eugenics Society included, apart from Churchill and Shaw,  Francis Galton, Neville Chamberlain, Charles Davenport, John Maynard Keynes and Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin and the president of the society from 1911 to 1928. During his time as Home Secretary under the Asquith government [1908-1915] Churchill proposed legislation for the involuntary sterilization of the “feeble-minded. Fortunately, the British parliament rejected his involuntary sterilization suggestions in the Mental Deficiencies Act of 1913.

The opposition by American conservative Christians in the 1920s to Darwinian evolution was partially fuelled by the political identification of evolution (a scientific theory) with eugenics (a program of social engineering that was both scientifically and morally defective).

American eugenicists visited Germany regularly, and the German eugenics institutions in Berlin were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Well before Hitler took power in 1933, his biography Mein Kampf preached the Nazi doctrine of “racial hygiene”: “Whoever is not bodily and spiritually healthy and worthy”, Hitler wrote, “shall not have the right to pass on his suffering in the body of his children.” Hitler referred to “The Passing of the Great Race,  a  bestselling book written by American eugenicist Madison Grant, as his “Bible,” and it was the first foreign language book to be published in Germany after the Nazis came to power.

It was only after the Nazi doctors’ appropriation of it in the death camps that the bogus science behind eugenics became subject to widespread criticism.

I find it chilling how biological science was co-opted by some of the leading intellects of their day to promote both “scientific racism” and “eugenics” with terrible consequences for the twentieth century. It is important that science students learn the history of their discipline, and especially how it has been misused to degrade and exclude, rather than empower, the weak.