From Eugenics to Patents: Genetics, Law, and Human Rights

Abstract

About a decade ago, President William Clinton said that the next half century will be the age of biology, and, that the engine of that age is genetics.Partly because of the Human Genome Project, scientists have been producing a torrent of information and claims about the role of genes in human disease, capacities, and behaviour.The new knowledge is bringing about a revolution in the diagnosis of diseases and disorders.It is also predicted to yield a powerful arsenal of therapies and cures-and possibly an ability to improve people genetically.According to some, it may also fulfil the longstanding dream of the eugenics movement, which flourished during the first-third or so of the last century.In a number of ways, the eugenics movement trampled on human rights as we understand them.It has no more powerful association than with the Nazis.In Germany during the Hitler years, the eugenics movement prompted the sterilisation of several hundred thousand people and helped lead to anti-Semitic programmes of euthanasia and ultimately, of course, to the death camps.But in fact after the turn of the century, eugenics movements, including demands for sterilisation of the unfit, blossomed in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Scandinavia, not to mention elsewhere in Continental Europe and parts of Latin America and Asia.Eugenics was thus not unique to the Nazis.It could-and did-happen everywhere.

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