The field of eugenics dates back to Darwin and Galton and the concept of selective breeding. It became a "science" with advances in statistical measurement and analysis. It was widely misused to justify scientifically and morally reprehensible actions in the early 1900's, most notably in Hitler's search for ethnic purity. Less well known are the programs in Europe, the United States and around the world that used eugenics as the justification for widespread institutionalization and sterilization of those considered unfit.

Scientific advancements in gene editing have placed the topic back on the front burner. In Conrol, Adam Rutherford examines the allure of reproductive control while succinctly laying out why the idea is not only inherently dangerous but scientifically impossible. Unfortunately, that won't stop rogue labs and scientists from ignoring the scientific, legal, ethical, political, and moral issues for their own ends and at some point science pundits could be trotted out to justify misguided political and legal actions.

It is my view that our scientific knowledge has outstripped our ability to fully understand the ramifications of tinkering with our genetic building blocks and it behooves us to arm ourselves with as much knowledge as possible. Rutherford's Control is a good place to start.

Eugenics and the line that crosses over to it is a fascinating subject. This books blends science and history really well. The first half focuses on the history of the eugenics movement and the second half on modern genetics and how it is (or isn’t) related to eugenics. This was a fascinating read, especially if you aren’t familiar with the eugenics movement of the United States.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the eARC in exchange for my honest review.

I am impressed by Adam Rutherford's ability to make eugenics a topic that is understandable (even if I cannot fathom that this was ever as popular as it was) and find the humor in it. I learned so much more about eugenics, how it goes beyond the Nazis and the "best family" contests that happened in the US, and how it lays the groundwork for the study of human genetics. Which is the whole reason I read nonfiction. Well, not the whole reason, but for nonfiction like this, yes, the whole reason.

Just as the word "abortion" tends to cause a knee-jerk reaction, so does the word "eugenics". I found Rutherford's work informative, approachable, and thought-provoking.

Adam Rutherford is a British geneticist and popular scientist, and Control is his brief history and analysis of the field of eugenics. This book was not necessarily what I was expecting - perhaps the part of me that enjoys reading disturbing books, especially disturbing nonfiction, was hoping for something darker (as the subtitle of the book seems to suggest). Instead, Rutherford gives a very straightforward accounting of the main figures (scientists, policymakers, and advocates) in eugenics, followed by his complication of the seemingly simple logic behind the theory.

Rutherford is undoubtedly good at distilling complex ideas, especially about his field of study, into digests for the layperson. I found myself skimming through the initial chapters about the history of eugenics, as surprisingly, I realized that I knew a lot of the material already (perhaps due to the fact that many of my philosophy and policy classes in college used eugenics as a case study). His list of figures in eugenics also got a bit tiresome - it felt like a rote retelling rather than trying to weave a story out of history. But Rutherford's update on what we know about genetics and the human genome since many of the prominent eugenicists lived, as well as why our current knowledge makes eugenics much more complex, was by far the most interesting part of the book.

My main takeaways were:
1. Pretty much every human trait is heritable.
2. Heritability concerns both genetics and environment. (It was never nature VERSUS nurture - it has always been both. For example, certain mental illnesses like schizophrenia have been shown to occur more frequently in people who experience hardship, and that hardship is often consistent from one generation to the next.)
3. Diseases, conditions, and other "undesirable" traits can not necessarily be edited out using CRISPR or even stopped by sterilization. (E.g., A policy that sterilizes adults who display symptoms of Huntington's disease is already too late to remove the "defective" gene from the germline and the population.)
4. Tough questions remain, such as the fact that many Scandinavian countries have decreased the population of individuals born with Downs Syndrome drastically because fetuses can be scanned for these traits in utero, and many women choose to have abortions if found. Individuals with Downs Syndrome can live full and happy lives and many advocates say that these abortions are unethical. Others say that caring for a person with Downs Syndrome requires significant time and financial resources that some families may not be equipped to provide. There are no easy answers to this question.

Rutherford does a good job of educating the reader on why eugenics is not as black-and-white as it may seem, what the current science supports, and what questions remain. This is a thought-provoking read for those looking to deepen their understanding of genetic science or have some fodder for ethical and philosophical discussions. Thank you to WW Norton and Company for the ARC via Netgalley.

Say the word “eugenics,” and most people’s minds immediately drift towards World War II and the atrocities that the Nazi’s brought to bear on those they had deemed “undesirable.” And you might think that the idea of eugenics has been tucked away in our distance past and forgotten.

Not so fast. In fact, I just read an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association published October 07, 2022 that specifically discussed the “stigma and exclusion of individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) within medicine, social services, public health, and society have a long history that persists to this day. The practices of eugenics and institutionalization were state-sanctioned and used within the US throughout much of the 20th century to remove persons with IDD from the population through forced sterilization and placement in institutions. These movements received widespread support at the time, including from leading medical and public health authorities.” [JAMA October 7, 2022. doi:10.1001/jama.2022.18500]

As you can see, the notion of eugenics is still alive and well.

And this brings me to the book, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics. I was familiar with eugenics as espoused in the United States, as I was researching it for a story I was outlining, but I wasn’t as familiar as I thought with the origins of the “theory.”

Without getting too far down the rabbit hole, eugenics can be traced back to Sir Francis Galton and his fascination with his cousin Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, specifically, the discussion of animal breeding. Galton used his vast intellect to research various aspects of human dynamics and attempt to codify them mathematically.

Those who followed in his eugenics and mathematical footsteps improved on his statistical techniques and those methods are still in use today, such as standard deviation, regression, correlation, etc.

I found this book fascinating and an easy read. I would recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in the subject of eugenics, especially the eugenics movement in the United Kingdom. Others who are interested in population statistics may find themselves engrossed with the uncomfortable origins of eugenics.

This is a book worth reading because the notion of eugenics won’t simply fade away.


5/5 stars

[Thank you to NetGalley and the author for the advanced ebook copy in exchange for my honest and objective opinion which I have given here.]

Control
By: Adam Rutherford
Review Score: 3 1/2 Stars

Five Key Feels

-I found it very interesting to learn more about the origins of Eugenics.

-The list of people who believed in Eugenics was fascinating.

-I wish there was more about how Eugenics played a role in Hitler’s plans for a master race.

-It was surprising to learn how Eugenist policies were alive and well in the United States and Great Britain even before Hitler rose to power.

-Control also discusses how Eugenics labs evolved into the genetic labs we see today.

———

Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics was kindly provided as an ARC by Netgalley and W.W. Norton & Company. Thank you for allowing me to read this wonderful book!

Release Date: 11/15/22

This was a very interesting book that touched on the start of Eugenics, how it was used by great leaders, and how it has impacted our lives today.

While I found this book to be very interesting, I wish there was more about how the Nazis used Eugenics. I think I went into this book expecting it to cover more of World War 2 history, and that was not the case.

Regardless, I found this book very interesting. I kept making notes about people who funded Eugenist research. The questions of intelligence, a lack of diseases, and preferred physical features are things that are still discussed today.

This was a very engaging book about the history of Eugenics and genetics. If you are interested in this topic, it is worth the read!

#bookstagram #books #readingnow #boogiereadsbooks #fivekeyfeels #audiobooks #audiobook #nonfiction #arcreview #netgalley #control #adamrutherford

This book was a really interesting read! It was incredible to learn about how engrained in our society and way of thinking that eugenics was (is, even), how many famous historical people that we respect were supporters and how even today we are still dealing with the consequences in decisions about choosing embryos when doing IVF for example. The book goes chronologically and in depth, this is not a simple explanation of eugenics in the past. The author maintains a scientific point of view, not being biased but letting the reader understand how complex of a topic this is and one we should be aware about.

I would very much like to read this book, a subject I plan to cover in my magazine in the future. However, the Kindle version is unreadable. The text is so faint I can't possibly read it, even with the brightness turned up all the way. Correct this problem and let me know when it's fixed and I'll consider reading it.

Control is a book about eugenics, its applications and how echoes of it affect our lives today. Eugenics was a movement whose motive was to improve the quality of the population through both voluntary and involuntary means. It arose from Social Darwinism, a misapprehension of how evolution and genetics work. People whose names are easily recognized today such as Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, Winston Churchill and Henry Ford were deeply involved in this movement. Scientists and statisticians, such as Galton and Pearson whose work we still rely on today, were also proponents of now debunked racial theories.

These theories were the basis of programs of forced sterilization of handicapped, people of lower than average intelligence, alcoholics, drug addicts and people that were simply different. All too often, these programs were imposed on minority populations. They were the rationale for the slaughter of millions under the Nazis. (Although I’m pretty sure the Nazis would have come up with their own theories anyhow.) Sterilization programs were instituted in the US. When we weren't busy sterilizing these, the handicapped and mentally ill, we were shuffling them off to institutions where they were safely out of sight and out of mind. Up through the 1970’s the developmentally disabled and mentally ill were forced to spend much of their lives warehoused apart from the rest of us in substandard living conditions. Rutherford writes that many of the leaders of the eugenics movement in the UK, once famous, are now infamous and the buildings who once were named after them have been renamed. How ironic, I thought, that the names of the very people who sought to make others invisible have now themselves disappeared. The author writes persuasively though, that people are not unalloyed saint or sinners and that even significant wrongs done by those who were proponents of eugenics should not erase the lasting good done by those same people.

Rutherford spends comparatively little time actually discussing the history of eugenics, which might dissuade some from reading this book. However I would urge those readers to reconsider. He writes well and has a sardonic sense of humor. More than that, she shines a light on misconceptions about genetics that still guide the decisions of many people today. How much we have learned about heritability over the past few years! The genetic roots of for example, schizophrenia I learned, come from multiple locations on the genome and people diagnosed with that disorder do not always have the same genome. More importantly, how much we do not now know about genetics greatly outweighs what we do know. Having said this, Rutherford writes persuasively that tools like Crispr, which have the ability to readily modify even small areas of the genome, must be used only under the strictest guidelines; they are far from reliable and the effect of any changes are unforeseeable. The latter part of this book, which covers in layman’s terms what we currently know, is far more valuable than the first part. If one has no interest in the history of eugenics it would still be worth reading this book for this part.

I owe WW Norton and Co and Netgalley sincere thanks for an ARC copy of this book in turn for an honest review.

Control is a great exploration of eugenics, tracing its scope over past and present. This isn't the first book to look at this topic, but I think it is the one that makes the best case about its relevance. Eugenics, as Rutherford certainly makes clear, has never really gone away. It's shifted in rhetoric and subject, but it is still with us. That is the message I take way from his writing. Divided into two main sections, he begins by looking at Galton and the establishment of race science. The second part brings it to current day, where me makes the case that our thinking about genetic manipulation, not to mention white supremacy, have eugenics as the primary driver. Rutherford's science background adds a lot to this history. Other works focus on public policy (sterilization laws, ie Buck v Bell) or the political debate surrounding it, this book really gets at the science of it, and the strength of that writing is in the second half. The genetics approach taken in the last part of the book is truly fascinating. I knew there was a lot of ethical dilemmas surrounding current research, but he frames it in a way that really made me take note and put it in an understandable paradigm.
Control really is about the long arc of how people have tried to control their populations. By reading this, you will surely be more aware of that hidden voice surrounding our current debates and discourse.

As a geneticist I am very interested in the history of eugenics and worrying about the potential of it happening in the future. Adam Rutherford address both of these topics very well in his most recent book.

The first part of the book focuses on the history of eugenics. I had not realized the extent to which eugenics was present in the America before WWII and how many of the 'greats' in genetics subscribed to eugenics. Throughout this discourse, I appreciated that Rutherford emphasizes that we can't throw out the work of everyone who had these views: "The past is a dirty place, its protagonists are merely people - evil, genius, and everything in between. We cannot and should not abandon no trash the scientific works of Galton, Fisher, Pearson, Jordan, Watson and the many others on whose scientific shoulders we stand."

The second part of the book hypothesizes as to what it could look like in the future and what to watch out for. He really highlights that "one thing we do know about human genetics with absolute confidence is how little we know." Thus, it will be difficult to create 'designer babies' and the like because genetics and the human body is very complicated (which I can attest to).

Overall, this a great read for those interested in the history of science and who want to learn more about eugenics and its impact.