As the title of this talk suggests, I want to structure it around the theme of history, and in particular, what insights or wisdom we can gain into contemporary genetic issues from a study of the past. Let me begin with two quotations to contrast. The first is from a classic text, Human Heredity, by Neel and Schull. They deal in 1954 with the eugenics movement of the previous generation by enjoining the reader, the student, to sample its most notorious work first-hand -- in particular, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race -- to experience the depravity of the ideas it promoted, and to see just what eugenics stood for. To avoid the pitfalls, they argue, you must confront them.

Well, times change, and a distinguished geneticist in 1992 takes a very different viewpoint. Here, eugenics was a mistake, but one that was destined to be overturned because it was the product of ignorance and prejudice rather than fact, and that was then, this is now. He leaves unanswered, of course, just how one distinguishes ignorance and prejudice from facts without the aid of hindsight, why geneticists of that era were unable to do so, and the basis for supposing that those of any other era would be better equipped to do so. This quotation is also particularly interesting because I suspect it is one of the very few times you will probably ever see the words "geneticists" and "humble" appear together in the same sentence.

The eugenics movement was international in scope, but there were also national traditions. The British, led by Karl Pearson, were dominated by biometry and ideas about class; the Latin American movements incorporated Lamarckism and social hygiene, as historian Nancy Stepan has shown; and the United States was dominated by Mendelism and race. What they all shared was the representation of their ideas as modern and scientific; and consequently the ideas were as appealing to both of ends of the political spectrum, seeking validation through modern science.

Madison Grant, the subject of the first quotation, was a well educated New York lawyer and well-connected amateur naturalist, involved in the founding of the New York Zoological Society. His 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, analyzed the social problems the U.S. was facing in a generation of immigration and urban slums, and concluded that these problems were basically genetic in nature.

Too many constitutionally inferior people were coming in and having too many babies, which was increasing the incidence of stupidity and crime, and hastening the decline of civilization as we know it. The genetic health of the American civilization was predicated on the excellent gene pool -- or germ plasm -- of north-west Europeans. The problem was that south-eastern Europeans were now immigrating in large numbers, posing a genetic threat. Drastic measures were obviously called for.

To Grant, the problem was biological, and the solution was biological. Elimination of the social failures; sterilization of an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning with the criminal, diseased, and insane, and extending to worthless race types. Now it would be inane to stand up here with the aid of nearly a century of hindsight and bash Madison Grant for you. Rather, I want to talk about how the book was received. Obviously there was a political message in the book, and it was widely embraced by the public.

And in fact it found favor with a broad spectrum of political leaders, who sent fan mail to Grant, from the former American President Theodore Roosevelt to the political aspirant Adolf Hitler, who of course, was only able to read it after it was translated into German in 1925.

More interesting, however, is that the leading science journals in the world reviewed it. In other words, they considered it to be science. The journal Science had a geneticist named Frederick Adams Woods review it, and he -- like the politicians -- found very little to criticize. The reason was simple: much of what Grant was saying was not far away from mainstream genetic knowledge.

One of the leading genetics books of the era was Heredity in Relation to Eugenics by Charles Davenport, which Grant cited. Davenport taught genetics at Harvard and Chicago, and left to found the Carnegie Institution’s genetics center at Cold Spring Harbor, later augmenting it with the Eugenics Record Office. He was one of the two most influential geneticists of the age, and he and Grant were close friends, and co-founders of the American Eugenics Society. Now, the American Eugenics Society is again not interesting so much for its message -- that American social problems lay in the hereditary constitutions of the lower classes and could only be ameliorated by restricting immigration and sterilizing the poor -- but in the way that the scientific community reacted to it.

Quite simply, they embraced it. Eugenics was scientific, it was technological, it was modern. Every American textbook of genetics of the 1920s advocated it. One of the most popular was Sinnott and Dunn’s Principles of Genetics (1925). Now bear in mind, both authors went on to professorships at Columbia, Sinnott ending up as dean of Yale’s Graduate School, and Dunn becoming an outspoken critic of racist biology after World War II. But in 1925 they have a whole chapter on eugenics in their textbook, telling us that even under the best circumstances, poor people are so genetically corrupt that their stock should be eliminated.

Now, that is not the kind of recommendation we are accustomed to seeing in human genetics books today, especially American ones. The history of this textbook is instructive: The entire eugenics chapter was deleted from their second edition in 1932. Now, of course, between 1925 and 1932, most people’s stocks were eliminated -- the market crashed -- which demonstrated convincingly that wealth was not necessarily a good predictor of genotype.

Given that the movement was so widespread and so mainstream in genetics, what kind of opposition did it encounter? Franz Boas published The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911, the same year as Davenport’s Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, and argued cogently that differences of class and culture were the result of history, not biology. His work was influential in the social sciences, but to geneticists he was denying modernity, progress, and the scientific genetic explanation of things. But he was right, as even geneticists came to appreciate long after everyone else. In 1916 in The Scientific Monthly [3:471-479], Boas published a critique of eugenics as thoughtful and complete as any that could be written today. It had no impact at all on the genetics community.

In fact, the first critiques by biologists of the eugenics movement would not come until nearly a decade later. Some, of course, simply agreed with its aims. Others, notably Thomas Hunt Morgan of Columbia, had become disenchanted but refused to challenge it publicly until about 1924 -- and even then, no names or specifics -- just a few polite barbs. And somewhat later, Herbert Spencer Jennings and Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins published more detailed critiques. Of course, by then, the laws restricting immigration and the Supreme Court decision upholding the right of the state to sterilize poor people against their wishes, both of which were based in part on the expert testimony of the genetics community, were in place. What is noteworthy is the absence of geneticists who recognized eugenics as being based on ignorance and prejudice rather than on facts, and therefore bound to die.

The legacy of the eugenics movement is not what it taught, since every generation has its pet theories -- but the reluctance or inability of geneticists to challenge it. Most geneticists simply believed it. A few didn’t, but also didn’t get too upset about it. After all, eugenics was building up interest in genetics. It was good for business. At least in the short run.

Well, of course we have the advantage of hindsight. Who could have known that when geneticists were saying that the poor and socially marginalized were not biologically good enough to reproduce, the Germans would have taken them so seriously? Which raises a good question: What is an adequate response to that recognition? "Whoops"? "Hey, we didn’t say to kill them, we only said to sterilize them"?

The reason for bringing up the eugenics movement is not to bash genetics but to analyze it and learn from our mistakes. The key feature is this: Genetics was corrupted in the 1920s by the confusion of folk knowledge with scientific inference. For whatever reasons, outsiders who recognized it were shunned, and insiders were, as they say, a day late and a dollar short. The fairly obvious lesson to be learned is that where science appears to validate folk beliefs, it needs to be subjected to considerably higher standards of scrutiny than ordinary science.

This raises a question about how to remember the eugenics movement. When the geneticists Dunn and Sturtevant wrote their separate histories of genetics in 1965, they made virtually no mention at all of this episode. Dunn himself had been a member of the American Eugenics Society; Sturtevant, like the other members of Morgan’s group except Hermann Muller, had not been.

To come to grips with the eugenics movement effectively, we have to examine its failures. I think these can be grouped into four categories.

First, their failure to acknowledge the distinction between the products of social history and biological microevolution. Were poor people poor because they were genetically feebleminded? Were Euro-Americans dominating the earth because of their genes? Maybe, but the stock market crash made it clear that whatever genetic variation existed across social classes was overwhelmed by the exigencies of social history, as Hermann Muller famously came to acknowledge in the early 1930s [Scientific Monthly, 37:40-47]. And the facts of archaeology and immigration showed that Europeans certainly had no monopoly on invention and civilization. So why even consider genetic differences, when the effects of everything else are so profound?

Anthropologists are particularly well known for their rejection of genetics as an explanatory principle in human behavior. Following Franz Boas, they had been conceptually disentangling social historical processes from biological microevolutionary processes. Their reasoning was simple: anthropology is concerned classically with the behavioral differences between groups of people. When it comes to behavioral variation in the human species, we already know a great deal about it. We know that virtually all the detectable behavioral variation between groups of people is the result of culture history. Why? Studies of immigrants, acculturation, history. The fact that many of your ancestors three, four, five generations ago spoke different languages, ate different foods, had different aspirations, led lives entirely different from yours today.

Odd as this may sound, people in the developed world today are very behaviorally homogeneous. In the kinds of foods we regard as edible, the sounds and gestures we regard as meaningful, in terms of making some sense of our lives, what we wear, the composition of our diet -- the entire fabric of our daily lives, no matter how diverse it seems, actually encompasses a very narrow range of the possibilities of variation realized elsewhere in our species.

The point, then, is that the bulk of human behavioral variation is between groups, and is non-genetic. Within groups there may well be genetic variation. Maybe there were genetic differences at work constructing the brains of, say, Newt Gingrich and Michael Jackson. But the behavioral differences between them are dwarfed by those between either of them and a traditional Sherpa from Nepal. And the historical processes that came to distinguish the behavior of a Sherpa from the behavior of an American, are of a different kind from the processes that came to distinguish them organically.

Second, their failure to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge. Herbert Spencer Jennings of Johns Hopkins called for a dose of scientific humility on the part of geneticists, the same year that he began to cut his ties to the eugenics movement. Students of heredity, he wrote,
 
 

Third, the failure to censure those who misrepresent genetic knowledge. Of course, there were popularizers of eugenics, who actively preached the racism, classism, and xenophobia that genetics appeared to validate. Some geneticists were indeed put off the eugenics movement, and began in the mid-1920s to criticize it, notably Thomas Hunt Morgan and shortly thereafter Jennings and Pearl of Johns Hopkins. When Raymond Pearl published his famous critique of eugenics in a magazine edited by his friend H. L. Mencken in 1927 [12:257-266], it was still a year after civil libertarian lawyer Clarence Darrow evolved from hero of biology in the creationism trial of Scopes to basher of biology in the same magazine, The American Mercury. Wrote Darrow in his 1926 article on eugenics [8:129-137], "Amongst the schemes for remolding society this is the most senseless and impudent that has ever been put forward by irresponsible fanatics to plague a long-suffering race."

The problem was that it was difficult to see that genetic knowledge was in fact being misrepresented. Pearl was listed as a dues-paying "professional member" of the American Eugenics Society in 1926. Madison Grant was a popularizer, but his views were entirely synoptic with those of Charles Davenport, arguably the leading human geneticist in America. When the leaders of the American Eugenics Society were searching for a second president in 1926 to succeed Yale economist Irving Fisher, Madison Grant was Davenport’s first choice. Fisher managed to talk him out of it, and they offered it to Herbert Spencer Jennings, who declined; and they ended up with geologist Roswell Johnson of Pittsburgh. The point, though, is that Madison Grant was very much an insider, not an outsider. And Jennings, also a dues-paying "professional member," was not perceived as an enemy by the eugenics movement.

In 1929, alongside Madison Grant on the Board of Directors, you find Davenport, Conklin of Princeton, and C. C. Little, founder of the Jackson Laboratories in Bar Harbor. On its large advisory council, alongside the popularizers Albert E. Wiggam and Lothrop Stoddard, you find the geneticists Castle and East of Harvard, Guyer of Wisconsin, Holmes of Stanford, Franklin Shull of Michigan, Herbert Walter of Brown, Frederick Adams Woods of MIT, Horatio Hackett Newman and Sewall Wright of Chicago. When Grant was a leader of the American Eugenics Society, those serving with him and under him constituted a veritable Who’s Who of the American genetics community. If there were those who muttered about Grant, they posed no major opposition.

If genetic knowledge was being actively misrepresented in the area of eugenics, there is little to suggest that geneticists acknowledged it, were upset about it, or acted to challenge it -- until long after it was too late. Why didn’t they? is a good question for historians to work on, and for geneticists to reflect on. There is an easy and obvious answer -- namely, that the geneticists of that era largely didn’t perceive that the popularizers were misrepresenting the field of genetics. And if they perceived anything as misrepresentation, they overlooked it, because they perceived any publicity for the science as good publicity, so anything anyone said about the determinative role of genetics in life was good for business, at least in the short run.

Finally, and most importantly, the geneticists of the earlier era were unwilling or unable to distinguish folk wisdom from scientific knowledge.

In his 1916 critique of eugenics, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber noted that all cultures have their own theories of heredity -- just as they have theories of astronomy or health care. These theories, of course, are not scientific. And Kroeber properly identified much of the literature of eugenics as having little to do with contemporary scientific knowledge of genetics -- in spite of the fact that it was being espoused by geneticists [Am. Anth., 18:19-40].

In other words, the eugenics literature was invested with the authority of science without being itself rooted in the science of genetics.

And that, I think, is the key lesson of the eugenics movement, which is vitally important today. Folk theories of heredity are independent of genetics, but derive legitimization from it. And since they are cultural ideas, they are often difficult to identify because they are taken for granted by the scientist, who is to some extent a product of the culture, and by the scientist’s audience. Consequently it is crucial for geneticists to highlight what the science of genetics does and doesn’t say, and how it’s different from common wisdom.

This, of course, directly relates to the overstatements associated with the publicity for the Human Genome Project. Is this statement true? Do we have fates? Are they in our genes? Is genetics just hi-tech astrology, though presumably more accurate? And if not, what is the meaning of this statement? Can you remember what geneticists become publicly indignant as a result of this statement, seeing it correctly as a setback for genetics education in America; or did they pretty much accept it as good for business, if a little over-zealous?

To use the wisdom we gain by studying the 1920s to help guide us now, we can identify three interlaced components of contemporary folk heredity. The first is racism, the evaluation of individuals on the basis of properties assigned to their groups, groups here being very loosely defined. It’s a folk theory of heredity because it is ostensibly a statement about the constitution of an individual in relation to a group, in modern terms a genotype in relation to a gene pool. But certainly this is in no way validated by genetics, which identifies individuals as unique genetic constellations, and differentiates populations on the basis of the frequencies of polymorphic alleles.

But an important component of racism is that it is exists independently of the existence of races, that is, of large, fairly homogeneous clusters of human populations. For example, anti-Semitism is a form of racism, but denying that Jews constitute a race hardly combats anti-Semitism effectively. The problem lies in the attribution of genetic or constitutional properties to the group which are presumably borne passively by its members -- that is, a folk theory of heredity.

The facts of human population genetics actively undermine it; the clinal nature of human variation, both genotypic and phenotypic, makes it difficult to identify, even in theory, discrete and homogeneous populations whose members are genetically diagnosable from their neighbors.

But more importantly group identity is a cultural construct. Humans make sense of their place in the world by being members and non-members of groups. Consequently we have a very strong tendency to cluster ourselves and to juxtapose ourselves, and it’s not surprising that we look hard to the science of genetics to validate our micro-taxonomies.

And thus it becomes doubly important that the folk taxonomies of race not be reified as genetics, and thereby validated. In a major work by a distinguished population geneticist, we find this map. The legend reads: "Four major ethnic regions are shown. Africans are yellow, Australians red, Mongoloids blue, and Caucasoids green." The problem here is not semantic -- as if calling them ethnic groups is okay because the problem is the word "race", rather than the concept. It’s not an issue of political correctness, enforced by the vocabulary police; it’s an issue of empiricism. Anywhere you draw a line, human populations on either side of it will be more similar to each other than to people further away in the same presumptive race.

In other words the unfortunate culmination of a masterful hi-tech synthesis of population genetic data is the imposition upon it of archaic racial categories. The human species does not come genetically packaged 4 ways or 12 ways or 30 ways; we culturally package it, and this map reflects the imposition of cultural or folk knowledge onto the data of human genetics. This is not racism, of course, but racialism -- the reification of cultural categories of humans as natural categories.

The problem with race as a concept is that it makes cultural divisions of the human species appear to be natural divisions. Like all folk taxonomies, racial classifications divide by cultural fiat things which cannot be qualitatively separated by their own properties. Racial classifications have meaning, but it isn’t biological meaning.

Sometimes it is useful to sort data on human populations by large scale clusters; but color-coding major arbitrary divisions of the species conveys the message that we have extracted a taxonomy from genetic data, when we have in fact imposed it on genetic data. Africans, after all, comprise an exceedingly heterogeneous group of populations, encompassing the tallest and shortest people on the planet, considerable variation in skin color, body build, and facial form, etc. What basis do we have for thinking that they comprise a single natural group equivalent to a single natural group called Caucasoids, or to stick with geographic labels, Europeans? Only our folk basis.

Hereditarianism is the second category of folk heredity. The idea that bad ideas or actions are somehow rooted in the constitutions of the actors certainly long pre-dates the science of genetics. The idea that groups of people are condemned by their constitutions to servitude, poverty, or malice, is not derived from the science of genetics, but stands to be validated by the science of genetics.

Maybe it’s true. But what kind of genetic data can be brought to bear? Consider, for example, the widely cited amazing twin coincidences. These are the Jim twins, studied by researchers at the University of Minnesota. Separated at birth, they were given the same name, married women with the same name, divorced them, took second wives with the same name, named their sons the same, and named their dogs the same. Wow. Nature one, nurture zero.

But let’s think about this scientifically. There’s a rather small universe of explanations for this. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. But the very fact that it comes up in discourse about genetics implies that it’s not intended to be regarded as a coincidence. Perhaps, then, it demonstrates the primacy of genetics in human affairs. Well, I suppose this is the place to ask for a show of hands, but I’ll spare us, and discount on theoretical grounds that the name you give your dog is under genetic control. Well, then, perhaps it demonstrates the psychic powers of identical twins.

And that is in fact precisely the way this story is represented in the popular media.

Now let’s pause for just a second. Suddenly we see that here hereditarianism is being validated not by genetics, but by parapsychology. I’d like to hope that the science of genetics is on somewhat firmer footing than parapsychology; if it isn’t, then the field is in some trouble. In fact, if these twins are indeed in psychic contact, it need hardly be pointed out that the correlations on their personality tests would be subject to an uncontrolled variable, thus rendering them useless. The point is that this work lies outside the realm of genetic discourse; there is no genetic science here.

And the process of elimination leaves one explanation for the amazing coincidences of the twins. There’s something wrong with the story. Baloney in print? Gasp, I can’t believe it. How could this possibly happen? Well, as one of my undergraduates, who is an identical twin with no psychic powers, said to me, "I guess we’ll never be on Oprah". If you’re a twin without an amazing story, nobody’s interested.

Another key hereditarian tenet is seen in the key phrase of The Bell Curve, the "cognitive ability" of people and groups. Of course an ability is not readily amenable to measurement; anything you observe or measure is constrained to be a performance. And the relationship between performance and ability is highly asymmetric: a good performance is indicative of good abilities; but a bad performance is not necessarily the result of the lack of ability. Performance has multiple causes, and ability is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for it. Since we don’t have a way to assess people’s abilities independently of their life histories, there is little scientific meaning to the word ability. It’s a concept that lies outside the science of human genetics, again a folk concept. This is not to say that people have identical abilities or gifts or talents, only that these are detectable only insofar as they have undergone some cultivation as a result of the experiences of life. They are folk hereditary concepts, generally detectable in retrospect, as a consequence of having observed some degree of success in some endeavor.

The issue is not, are there native abilities, but rather, can we at present know anything scientifically about them. And if we can’t, then we have an obligation to see that diverse talents are cultivated as widely as possible, because the alternative is to condemn groups of people on the basis of the circumstances of their birth, and to deny our world the benefits that their talents and abilities would have brought, had they been allowed to develop.

Certainly the area in which the complementarity of genetics and folk heredity is most obvious is in behavioral genetics. Here often the currency is not so much a deterministic argument linking a specific functional DNA segment and a genotypic constitution and phenotypic state, but rather a statistical correlational argument associating a grossly circumscribed and ostensibly causal nexus to a common-sense phenotype, and leaving the rest to the science journalists.

Now I’m not planning to begin competing with the McKusick catalog, but I think it may be time to start a compendium of non-genes that have been mapped to the human genome. Of course, classically, aggression was not mapped to the Y chromosome; and most recently alcoholism was not mapped to chromosome 11; and heading the list of course is manic depression, which has not been mapped to several different chromosomes. This is an area that, in my opinion, really does need to consider its responsibility as a science to divorce itself from folk ideas.

In this context as well, we should be very wary of the radical materialist syllogism which goes: Genes determine the structure of the brain, which in turn is the seat of the mind, which is the locus of thoughts, which lead to behaviors.

Therefore bad deeds are caused by bad genes. This spurious line of reasoning can be found in the scientific literature from Charles Davenport through Daniel Koshland, and has been used to justify not only the field of behavioral genetics, but as well the biological superiority of social classes and colonial nations.

The fact that most behavioral variation in our species is between-group variation, raises the question, exactly what are we looking for when we talk about behavioral genetics? And the fact is, we are looking for a hypothetical genetic component to account for a very narrow band-width of behavioral diversity in the human species.

The third area of folk heredity is essentialism, which has many meanings; and I’m using it in the sense of making specific assertions about human nature. Of course, human nature is an old sand-trap in philosophy, and again it needs to be appreciated that any statement about human nature, is a statement about the human constitution, and stands in contrast to chimpanzee or gorilla nature, from which it has recently genetically diverged.

If we say it is human nature to be, say, unfaithful, that implies something about alternative phenotypic states. Either they represent non-human nature, or they represent human unnature. Either way, there is certainly a strong value judgment that comes attached to statements about the human constitution, in the absence of genetic data bearing on the human constitution. If we say it is human nature to be faithful or unfaithful, then we’ve made nothing but a trivial statement about human nature.

The point of this discourse is that for all the talk about the science wars, and the two cultures, human genetics is an area in which humanistic knowledge proves to be as valuable as scientific knowledge, and exceedingly complementary to it. And with the growing emphasis on technology, the humanities take on an ever increasing value for geneticists.

I want to tie this talk together by discussing the question that I get asked most in my line of research, molecular anthropology. I think it’s fairly well known these days that chimpanzees, gorillas and humans are genetically very similar.

So similar, in fact, that it’s hard to tell them apart genetically, although any idiot can presumably tell them apart readily any way except genetically. If you look at the structure of their chromosomes, there’s only three obvious differences.

The first is that there is heterochromatic DNA, which is detected in a few characteristic places in the human chromosomes as C-bands.

On the chromosomes of a chimp or gorilla, however, this DNA is not there, but found instead at the tips of nearly all the chromosomes.

Second, there is a large human chromosome (number 2) that the apes lack, but which matches almost perfectly the structure of two small chromosomes.

And third, if you take the DNA from human chromosome 5 (detected by in situ hybridization in green here) and the DNA from human chromosome 17 (detected here in pink), and identify the locations of those DNAs, you find in gorillas, shown here, two pairs of chromosomes each partly pink and partly green. In other words, we find chromosomes that are part 5 and part 17; they have been translocated in the gorilla.

Now the fact is, these are fairly subtle differences. And the question I get asked most, usually by wide-eyed science students is this: If humans and gorillas are genetically so similar, would it be possible to produce a hybrid in the laboratory?

I used to answer that question facetiously: "It’s already been done; how else can you account for Ronald Reagan?" But I take the question a lot more seriously now, because I think it overlays a lot of important things that we take for granted in science education these days, and which need to reconsidered.

The answer I give now is this: Your guess is as good as mine, probably better. But let’s say you do the experiment. What are you going to do with the baby? How are you going to raise him/her/it? As an ape? As a human? You are talking about producing an organism outside of any natural society. What do you think your responsibilities are to that baby?

Are you going to raise him/her/it in isolation from the rest of the world, which would be psychologically destructive to an ape or a human; or announce it to the world, and allow the tabloids in to film the offspring’s life? What kind of an identity will you help him/her/it achieve? Bi-racial children have a hard enough time.

Assuming you have produced a sentient articulate being, how will you answer the questions: What am I? Why don’t I fit in? Why is no one else like me?

Budding geneticists learn to think technologically. It is the current generation which is being forced to think about responsibilities and obligations to their subjects, and about accountability. "Could it be done" is not simply a biochemical question, it is a social and ethical question. And let me make it clear that by "ethical" I don’t mean to suggest that there are some things we shouldn’t know, for I think we should strive to know everything. By "ethical" I mean it’s a question that involves acknowledging responsibilities on the part of the researcher to the objects of analysis. Doing research on humans is different from doing research on subatomic particles, because as a human studying humans you break down the distinction between subject and object that is characteristic of modern classical science. Thus, Doing research on humans may be technological, but doing it right is social and ethical. Designing a research project and designing a research project so that you don’t harm, victimize, or stigmatize anybody, because you will be held accountable if you do, is a fairly new idea. And it’s something that the current generation has to be prepared for.

One can see the problem baldly in the roadblocks that the Genome Diversity Project has encountered. Should there be a research museum or warehouse of genetic material on the diversity of the human species? Of course; the issue is how should it be established; and the problem is quite simply that technology was considered to be the central issue, and responsibility to be something that would be dealt with, some time in the future. These well-intentioned geneticists went to bed with the idea of a genetic repository of the human species, a nice idea, and one that has been proceeding on a small scale for decades, and they woke up on the cutting edge of anthropological and bio-ethics, having to account publicly for the apparent exploitation of the bodies of indigenous peoples, in an ostensibly post-colonial world, and were unfortunately entirely unprepared for it.

Genetics has always been driven by technology. As Time Magazine says, (technologically) the future is now. But the past is also still with us.

There are, to be sure, two schools of thought on the value of history. Applied to human issues, genetics becomes a humanistic and social science; and it has a poor track record. The first generation of modern human geneticists failed to appreciate the fundamental civil liberties and human rights which we take for granted now. If the post-modern world is a better place now, it is unfortunately in spite of, not because of, the genetics and geneticists of that era. And as technology improves, the opportunity for harm -- intended or not -- improves with it. That is the basic tradeoff of technology in society.

Let us make their mistakes our lessons. The responsibilities incurred by the nineteen-twentieths of the Human Genome Project’s budget which is not devoted to ethical, legal, and social implications, constitute the greatest intellectual challenge for the field. They need to be part of every present geneticist’s consciousness, and every future geneticist’s education.