War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (83 page)

But correction will not be cheap. Only the affluent who can today afford personalized elective health care will be able to afford expensive genetic correction. Hence, economic class is destined to be associated with genetic improvement. If the genetically “corrected” and endowed are favored for employment, insurance, credit and the other benefits of society, then that will only increase their advantages. But over whom will these advantages be gained? Those who worry about “genelining,” “genetic ghettos” and a “genetic underclass” see a sharp societal gulf looming ahead to rival the current inequities of the health care and judicial systems. The vogue term
designer babies
itself connotes wealth.

The term
designer babies
is by and large just emblematic of the idea that genetic technology can do more than merely correct the frail aspects of human existence. It can redress nature’s essential randomness. Purely elective changes are in the offing. The industry argues over the details, but many assure that within our decade, depending upon the family and the circumstances, height, weight and even eye color will become elective. Gender selection has been a fact of birth for years with a success rate of up to 91 percent for those who use it.
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It goes further-much further. A deaf lesbian couple in the Washington, D.C., area sought sperm from a deaf man determined to produce a deaf baby because they felt better equipped to parent such a child. A child was indeed born and the couple rejoiced when an audiology test showed that the baby was deaf. A dwarf couple reportedly wants to design a dwarf child. A Texas couple reportedly wants to engineer a baby who will grow up to be a large football player. One West Coast sperm bank caters exclusively to Americans who desire Scandinavian sperm from select and screened Nordics.
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All of us want to improve the quality of our children’s futures. But now the options for purely cosmetic improvements are endless. A commercialized, globalized genetic industry will find a way and a jurisdiction. It will be an international challenge to successfully regulate such genetic tampering and the permutations possible because few can keep up with the moment-to-moment technology.

It goes much further than designer babies. Mass social engineering is still being advocated by eminent voices in the genetics community. Celebrated geneticist James Watson, codiscoverer of the double helix and president of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, told a British film crew in 2003, “If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease. The lower 10 per cent who really have difficulty, even in elementary school, what’s the cause of it? A lot of people would like to say, ‘Well, poverty, things like that.’ It probably isn’t. So I’d like to get rid of that, to help the lower 10 per cent. “
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For the first half of the twentieth century, Cold Spring Harbor focused on the “submerged tenth”; apparently, the passion has not completely dissipated.

Following in the footsteps of Galton, who once amused himself by plotting the geographic distribution of pretty women in England, Watson also told the film crew, “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.” Watson gave no indication of what the standard for beauty would be.
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Some who speak of human cloning speak of mass replication of a perfected species. That is nothing less than a return to the campaign to create a master race-but now aided by computers, digital communications and a globalized commercial infrastructure to accelerate the process. Some of America’s leading thinkers on genetic evolution believe that within a few hundred years, the world will indeed be divided into the “genetically endowed”-or “GenRich” as some call them-and those who will serve them, almost like the worker bees Davenport envisioned.
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Advocates of the genetic divide encourage it as a matter of personal choice, and argue that the same man who purchases eyeglasses, tutors his child or seeks medical attention to conquer his biological limitations is destined to take the next step and achieve genetic superiority. This is not the philosophy as much as the
raison d’etre
of newgenics.

It will transform the human species as we know it. Transgenic creatures-created from two or more species-are now commonplace. Genomic engineers have implanted a human embryo in a cow. In British Columbia, fish hatcheries have engineered an oversized salmon dubbed “Frankenfish” that is more profitable to raise. Geneticists have inserted the jellyfish’s gene for luminescence into rhesus monkey DNA, creating a monkey that glows in the dark; the creature was named ANDi for “inserted DNA” in reverse. No one can successfully legislate or regulate experimentation on monkeys. In the suburbs of Washington, D.C., J. Craig Venter, one of the scientists who led the efforts to map the human genome, has announced plans to create a new form of bacterial life to aid in hydrogen energy production.
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Bioethicists are of little help in this hurtling new world. The still emerging field of bioethics includes self-ordained experts who grant interviews to television talk shows and newspapers even as they consult as scientific advisors to the very corporations under question. The do’s and don’ts of genetic tinkering are being revised almost daily as the technology breeds an ever-evolving crop of moral, legal and social challenges that virtually redefine life itself.

It will take a global consensus to legislate against genetic abuse because no single country’s law can by itself anticipate the evolving inter-collaborative nature of global genomics. Only one precept can prevent the dream of twentieth-century eugenics from finding fulfillment in twenty-first-century genetic engineering: no matter how far or how fast the science develops, nothing should be done anywhere by anyone to exclude, infringe, repress or harm an individual based on his or her genetic makeup. Only then can humankind be assured that there will be no new war against the weak.