The University of Southampton

Author: Erin Hollington

Eugenics – how we’ve come full circle

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When you hear the word eugenics, most people immediately think of the Nazis, but there are still a lot of modern-day ethical issues surrounding the ideas of eugenics. First, let us define eugenics:

‘the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable’.

Now using this definition, we can look at how it relates to what the Nazis did and while not the first-time ideas of eugenics were used, it is the most well-known. They used their ideas of eugenics to ‘euthanise’ those within the state who were deemed to be ‘incurably ill’. This included thousands of disabled people who were considered to be unproductive members of the state and after this followed the larger groups such as the Roma, Sinti, and Jews. Here eugenics were used to justify the death of millions as a way of ‘population control’ which is very clearly a hugely ethical issue. While most people are completely against the Nazi uses of ideas of eugenics, there are some who believe that eugenics could be utilised again today in order to help overpopulation.

I became interested in this topic after covering the historical elements in our ethics and law lecture, so decided to do some more research on the subject and how it affects the world today. During my research I came across the fact that in 2019,  a group of 11,000 scientists signed a statement urging population control in order to slow down the death of the earth due to climate change. This idea that we should control the population in order to sustain resources is not new. However, these ideas have been trialled in the past with poor results, for example China’s one child policy that was implemented to stop the exponential population growth of the country actually led to more of an increase rather than slow its growth. While these ideas of eugenics follow on from historical ones there is a new form that we have seen develop in more recent years, the idea of designer babies.

The concept of designer babies is where genetic testing is done on a child being created via IVF in order to determine whether they will have certain characteristics. The concept of designer babies is arguably the most ethically challenging as originally, this testing was done only to determine whether the child would be healthy, but it is now being used as a way for potential parents to determine whether the child will fit their expectations of that they want them to look like. I would argue that this is a new form of eugenics as it is allowing people to follow the idea of only creating children who have desired characteristics and as stated earlier, this is the definition of eugenics.

With these new forms of ideas of eugenics, it seems as though we have come full circle. From the Nazis using eugenics as their reasoning for murdering millions of innocent people, to modern day ideas of a way to protect our finite resources and then to creating IVF children with specific characteristics, eugenics seems to be an inescapable way of thinking. There is no way to justify these ideas as they put lives at risk. They fell under the radar as an ethical issue after WWII but with the concept of designer children and a need to protect our planet they are once again becoming an ethical issue within our society.

How did the Nuremburg Trials affect the creation of medical (and bio) ethics?

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While nowadays we accept the exitance and necessity of bioethics we often overlook their origins. Despite being a physics student, I take a lot of interest in history and ethics so when we covered both these topics, I immediately decided I wanted to look further into it. This led me to the question of how the Nuremburg trials – specifically those for the Nazis doctors of concentration camps – led to the development of medical and bioethics.

Throughout WWII many number of atrocities were committed by the Nazis, but some may argue that the greatest were those crimes against humanity that were committed by doctors of the Nazi state. With ideas of eugenics becoming ever more popular and the Nazi want to eliminate those who they deemed didn’t contribute to the state, millions of innocent people were murdered, and thousands were subjected to medical experimentation. Now while this all sounds like a brief historical overview into the Nazi doctors we can use this information to see how out of this the first ideals of medical and bio ethics were created. Following then end of the war, Nazi leaders were tried at the Nuremburg trials, with there being a specific trial for the doctors who experimented on people in concentration camps throughout the war.

The Nuremburg doctors trial

These doctors’ trials led to the creation of the Nuremburg code, a set of ethics rules for conducting medical and biological research. Prior to WWII the only previous outline to medical research ethics were the ‘Guidelines for Human Experimentation of 1931’ which the doctors asked to be tried under for their experimentation , but the prosecutors refused and came to the conclusion of trying 16 out of the 23 for crimes against humanity.

It has been said by some that if they had been in the same situation – a leading country in medical development with unlimited human subjects as resources and the propaganda to believe what they were doing is right – they would have done the same. Looking back now we know how awful this experimentation was and can’t even begin to imagine how someone could have concluded that it was okay. But at the time many Nazi doctors believed what they were doing was right and the growing ideals of eugenics pushed them to further what they thought was acceptable and ‘good’ research. There were many scientific advancements made to understanding different neurological diseases but in no way do the ends justify the means. This merely shows how much of a lack of guidelines behind research ethics there were as no patients were ever informed of what was happening and research was always carried out in the name of science without taking into consideration the person.

Following the Nuremburg trials the code was created as a way to highlight all that was wrong with the Nazi State’s  experimentation and lack of thought for life. They were the first outline for medical ethics, and in which highlighted the need for consent from patients and that the primary concern of doing no harm . While the Nuremburg code was somewhat ambiguous, and statements left open to interpretation, it did lead to the creation of the Declaration of Helsinki. This is an ever-changing document to lay out correct medical practice and ethics in research – bioethics. The Declaration of Helsinki is still to this day a widely respected and followed document for Drs across the globe to hold themselves to in their work and practice. So, we can see that from the atrocities of WWII, eugenics and Nazi experimentation came the creation of medical and bioethics that are followed today. This can all be summed from a quote in the Nuremburg code:

‘All contemporary debate on human experimentation is grounded in Nuremberg’

Nuremburg Code 1947
An insight into what the Nuremburg code is

Introduction

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Coming from a physics background, this module was something completely new and different for me. Where I’m used to everything from blackholes to quantum wave functions, this module is a way to step outside my comfort zone and explore how physics and engineering can be applied to help people. One way that physics and biomed appear to overlap (from my limited research) is in the world of nanomedicine. Defined as ‘a branch of medicine that applies the knowledge and tools of nanotechnology to the prevention and treatment of disease.’ nanomedicine seems like it may be future of targeted drug delivery. Utilizing things within the nano dimensions such as sensors and robots it can be used for delivery and sensing purposes of live cells, nanomedicine may in future provide a cleaner, safer and more accurate future for internal medicine.