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EUGENICS AND HISTORIC TRAUMA

As William Bateson reflected upon
Mendel’s laws of inheritance and
carried out his own research on
pea plants, he began to understand
how people might one day misuse
genetic information. Even without
knowledge of DNA, Bateson was
far ahead of his time when in 1928,
he wrote, “What, as we asked at the
outset, will happen when . . . the
facts of heredity are as commonly
known as those for bacteriology,
for example? One thing is certain.
Mankind will begin to interfere.”
Bateson’s writing seems to
show that he foresaw the concerns
people in the twenty-first century
have about interfering with William Bateson was a fellow of the
Royal Society, a prestigious scientific
heredity. If Bateson had known
institution located in the UK. The Royal
that one day physicians could alter Society was first founded in 1660 and
genes, he might have asked himself included such members as Sir Isaac
some of the questions that appear Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein,
and Stephen Hawking.
in contemporary media. Should
parents, for instance, be allowed
to select specific genetic traits to pass on to their children, creating a
so-called “designer baby”? Should a government or national health-care
system be allowed to intervene in a person’s medical care if that person
has a specific inherited condition? Bateson went on to write in the same
passage, “When power is discovered, man always turns to it. The science
of heredity will soon provide power on a stupendous scale; and in some

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