CIENCIASMEDICASNEWS: BioEdge: The company they keep

domingo, 10 de abril de 2016

BioEdge: The company they keep

The company they keep

by Michael Cook | 8 Apr 2016 |

“Europe’s superlab”, a £700 million research institute, the Francis Crick Institute, opens this year. It is Europe’s largest biomedical research centre, a partnership between six of the UK’s best known scientific and academic organisations – the government funded Medical Research Council (MRC), Cancer Research UK (CRUK), the Wellcome Trust, UCL (University College London), Imperial College London and King’s College London.

It has been named after Sir Francis Crick, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins.

But in times when universities are being battered for naming building and institutes after colonialists and racists, why has the UK’s science establishment named its “altar to biomedical science” (in the words of The Guardian) after an outspoken eugenicist?

This is a question posed by Philippa Taylor in her blog on Christian Medical Comment.

Crick was so convinced of the power of genetics that he even questioned the equality of “Negros”. In February 1971 he wrote in a letter to members of the American National Academy of Sciences that:

“more than half the difference between the average I.Q. of American whites and Negroes is due to genetic reasons, and will not be eliminated by any foreseeable change in the environment. Moreover I think the social consequences of this are likely to be rather serious unless steps are taken to recognize the situation…”

In 1970 he told Dr Bernard Davis, of Harvard Medical School, that people who were “poorly genetically endowed” should be sterilised:

“…My other suggestion is in an attempt to solve the problem of irresponsible people and especially those who are poorly endowed genetically having large numbers of unnecessary children. Because of their irresponsibility, it seems to me that for them, sterilization is the only answer and I would do this by bribery. It would probably pay society to offer such individuals something like £l,000 down and a pension of £5 a week over the age of 60. As you probably know, the bribe in India is a transistor radio and apparently there are plenty of takers.”

The name is doubly unfortunate, she suggests, because the focus of the new Institute is precisely developing the biomedical tools which will make do-it-yourself eugenics possible. Some people might forgiven for being sceptical of oaths taken never to engage in eugenics.

- See more at: http://www.bioedge.org/bioethics/the-company-they-keep/11825#sthash.qkIxdO9l.dpuf

In events which seem copied from the script of a B-grade potboiler, the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has, at the age of 60, just discovered that he is not who he thought he was. After taking a DNA test to disprove rumours that he was not his father's son, he learned that the rumours were true. His real father was the last private secretary of Wnston Churchill, Sir Anthony Montague Browne.

Despite his deep religious faith, the Archbishop seems quite shaken by the news. He surmounted a difficult childhood with alcoholic parents to become a successful oil executive and then an Anglican priest. He had no idea that the ne'er-do-well whom he regarded as his estranged father was not. In an interview with The Telegraph [London] he said:

“My own experience is typical of many people. To find that one’s father is other than imagined is fairly frequent. To be the child of families with great difficulties in relationships, with substance abuse or other matters, is far too normal.

“Although there are elements of sadness, and even tragedy in my father’s case, this is a story of redemption and hope from a place of tumultuous difficulty and near despair in several lives ... I know that I find who I am in Jesus Christ, not in genetics, and my identity in him never changes.”

Although this is just an anecdote, it confirms what I've always regarded as one of the most important principles in contemporary bioethics: that every child deserves to know his or her biological parents. Archbishop Welby is better prepared than most to survive a personal earthquake like this, but it is an earthquake. To know who we are, to have a secure personal identity, is an important dimension of our autonomy.