Transcript

Episode 15: Making “Smarter” Babies: The Mythology of American Eugenics

 

EPISODE SUMMARY

Emily Klancher Merchant, PhD, explains that “intelligence—not race—has always been at the center of American eugenics.” She cautions that “eugenics does not work by breeding smarter humans;” no technology has been shown to do this. The widespread, American belief that intelligence is primarily genetic has allowed governments to shirk responsibility for ameliorating social inequality.

GUEST BIO

Emily Klancher Merchant, PhD, is a historian of science, technology, and medicine, focusing on the human sciences in the United States since World War I. She is Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of California at Davis.

RESOURCES 

TRANSCRIPT

Hi everyone, this is Genetic Frontiers, a podcast about the promise, power, and perils of genetic information. Find us wherever podcasts are found, and go to geneticfrontiers.org to join the conversation about how genetic discoveries are propelling new, personalized medical treatments, but also posing ethical dilemmas and emotional quandaries. I'm your host, Susanna Smith.

On today's episode, I will be talking with Dr. Emily Klancher-Merchant, who is a historian of science, technology, and medicine and Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the University of California at Davis. Professor Merchant has written about many topics, including environmental history and the history of demography, including in her book, Building the Population Bomb. More recently, she's written about behavioral genetics and sociogenomics.

In an article that was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books called “Breeding for IQ”, Professor Merchant traces the core of eugenic thinking, past and present to the pursuit of intelligence. Early in the 20th century during the height of pre-World War II eugenics researchers developed a number of standardized tests to measure human intelligence in an effort to identify people of low intelligence many of whom were then classified as unfit to have children.

And as we talked about in Episode 6, tens of thousands of people in the United States who were identified as unfit were then forcibly sterilized. Conversely, and less often discussed. is the fact that employers, government agencies and universities also relied on intelligence testing to categorize and sort people into jobs, career tracks, and to some degree socioeconomic class based on their perceived abilities. Many of those intelligence tests are still used today, despite widespread criticism that they are inherently biased and a lack of scientific consensus on what they actually measure or even how we should define human intelligence. Culturally, the idea that human intelligence is fixed, biological, and inheritable persists. There is a growing movement, vocally supported by Elon Musk and other tech elites pushing for couples, specifically couples that are well-educated, wealthy, professionally successful, largely straight and white to have more children. Using genetic technologies like in vitro fertilization with polygenic embryo screening to select embryos that will produce “more intelligent” children.

Professor Merchant points out though as of 2012, “scientists had found no specific genes with any bearing on intelligence in the normal range, and no variants that increase intelligence.” At least four subsequent genome-wide association studies have tried to establish links between people’s genetics and their educational attainment. Educational attainment was slotted in by researchers as a rough, albeit questionable proxy for intelligence because data on educational attainment was easier to collect than measures of intelligence on such a large population. The most recent study of 3 million people suggested that among white Americans, a person’s genetic propensities accounted for only 16 percent of variance in how many years of education a person had. Which means 84 percent of the differences in how long a person stayed in school was likely related to something other than genetics.

This is a deeply fraught area of genetic and genomic research called sociogenomics, which some argue can lead to molecular eugenics.

Thank you for joining me today on Genetic Frontiers, Professor Merchant to untangle some of this. 

Emily Klancher Merchant
Thank you for having me.

Susanna Smith
We’re going to start by having you read an excerpt from an article that I mentioned in the introduction, “Breeding for IQ,” which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books and is available online. Please go ahead, Professor Merchant.  


READING 

(Adapted from “Breeding for IQ.” Los Angeles Review of Books. August 22, 2024.)

Emily Klancher Merchant

Americans today typically conflate eugenics with racism, genocide, coercive sterilization, and ableism. This popular image, however, misses two key features of eugenics as it has existed in the United States since its importation from England at the turn of the 20th century. The first is that intelligence—not race—has always been at the center of American eugenics. Historically, eugenics and racism have operated in tandem, but neither is reducible to the other. Eugenics attributes socioeconomic inequality—both within and between racially defined groups—to varying levels of intelligence, which it defines as a biological quality shaped largely by our DNA. The second key feature is that, although the eugenics movement was responsible for the legalization of involuntary sterilization in a majority of US states, eugenics has depended primarily on individuals policing the gene pools of their own families, not on government intervention.

But eugenics does not work by breeding smarter humans. No genetic intervention, not even polygenic embryo screening, has been shown to do this. Rather, eugenics works by naturalizing socioeconomic inequality and generating support for policies that enhance the life chances of those at the top of the social hierarchy and reducing the life chances of those at the bottom.

Scientists have learned that both education and genetics are more complicated than they initially thought. As sociologists have long known, educational attainment is not a straightforward reflection of intelligence, but rather the result of a long and complex series of social interactions.

Our DNA, it turns out, has been shaped by a much longer series of social interactions.

Governments and social institutions, most notably the family, play an enormous role in access to education and marriage partners, forging correlations between educational attainment and genomes that show up in genome-wide association studies. Within family analysis indicates that only about 25% of the predictive effect of the most recent educational polygenic score works through biochemical mechanisms, while the remaining 75% reflects correlations between an individual's educational polygenic score and the environment in which they're raised, including their parents' income and education and the quality of schools they attend. For this reason, individuals with low polygenic scores for educational attainment typically experience more educational success if they're adopted by well-educated parents or attend wealthier schools.

Even the proportion of the effect that works through biochemical mechanisms might not actually increase cognitive function. It might instead make a person taller, which has a positive effect on education, or more attractive, which has been shown to elicit a positive response from teachers.

Untangling these effects is beyond the capacity of today's scientists. Regardless, a child's socioeconomic status plays a larger role in their educational trajectory than does their DNA. Children with high polygenic scores for educational attainment but low parental income graduate from high school and college at lower rates than children with low polygenic scores for educational attainment but higher parental income.”

A 2023 study published in Science asked Americans whether they would consider using polygenic embryo screening to increase the chances of the resulting child's acceptance to a top 100 university if such a service were available. The science suggests, however, that whether any particular child attends a more selective university will likely have little to do with their DNA. And more to do with other factors that enter into the college admissions process, and with everything that leads up to it.

Yet this fact has not penetrated the public discussions about polygenic embryo selection.

Both advocates and critics are focused on the ethics of using genetics to increase babies' intelligence. Under the assumption that polygenic embryo selection works the way that companies that sell these services claim. Advocates sometimes concede that educational polygenic scores are not terribly powerful at this point. But they're also quick to point out that such instruments will soon become more predictive as genome-wide association studies get even larger. And they point to the supposedly imminent invention of in vitro gametogenesis, the conversion of somatic cells such as skin cells, into sperm or egg cells, which would dramatically increase the number of embryos available to a couple and thus increase the chances of an outlier at the top of the polygenic score distribution. Yet these claims neglect the fundamental finding of research in social and behavioral genomics, which is that DNA has little direct bearing on social outcomes, like educational attainment and college admission. While critics warn that choosing embryos for their predicted educational attainment will further entrench existing inequalities. Advocates argue that doing so is a duty. They argue that parents have a moral imperative to give their children the best brains money can buy not just for the sake of the children themselves but also for the sake of society. But by assuming that polygenic embryo screening will one day work as claimed, even if it doesn't do so yet both sides are buying into and thereby furthering, the larger eugenicist project of attributing socioeconomic inequality to genetic variation.

It's unlikely that larger genome-wide association studies, more precise polygenic embryo screening, in vitro gametogenesis, or even germline genome editing will make our society more like the one portrayed in the 1997 film Gattaca. What could bring us there, however, is widespread adoption of the belief that intelligence is primarily genetic, and that it can be altered through polygenic embryo screening and CRISPR.

Eugenics has never worked primarily by producing more intelligent babies. Instead, it has worked by creating the illusion that intelligence is primarily genetic, absolving governments of responsibility for ameliorating social inequality. The illusion leads to policies that enhance the life chances of those who are already privileged, while further diminishing the life chances of those who are not.

Susanna Smith 

Thank you for sharing a bit of your work.

Susanna Smith 

So you mentioned in that overview that survey research about Americans' views on polygenic embryo screening and whether they would use that to select for more intelligent offspring. Is this something only pursued by people with fringe views? What does the research show?

Emily Klancher Merchant
It's impossible to know how many people are actually using polygenic embryo screening to try to select for intelligent offspring because this practice occurs in a DIY fashion, as I described in the LA Review but I would guess that the number is very, very small.

About a year ago, CNN reported that 2% of all births in the United States result from IVF, which is a prerequisite for polygenic embryo screening. This is already a tiny fraction of all births, and the vast majority of people who use IVF don't do polygenic embryo screening at all. So those who are doing it to increase their children's intelligence are a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction.

But also, about a year ago, an article in Science, which I mentioned in the LA Review claimed that a sizable proportion of Americans would seriously consider polygenic embryo screening for intelligence if it were more widely available. This finding was based on a nationally representative survey in which participants reported an average likelihood of use of 43%.

Yet, I have trouble taking this finding seriously because participants were misled in two ways. First, they were told that polygenic embryo screening could increase the chances of their child attending a Top 100 college from 3% to 5% but there's no evidence that this is true. Second, half of participants were told that 10% of people like them were already using the technology while the other half were told that 90% were already using it. Both figures are gross overestimates, and as the researchers found, people were more likely to consider polygenic embryo screening for their own children if they thought more people were already using it. By falsely representing the efficacy and prevalence of this technology to research participants the scientists who did the study artificially inflated their estimate of the percentage of Americans who would consider using polygenic embryo screening to increase their children's intelligence. At this point, I would say that polygenic embryo screening probably is only pursued by people with fringe views, but if it becomes more widely available, and if more people begin to use it, that will probably change.

Susanna Smith 

Yeah, it's fascinating though the cyclical response of that:iIf it becomes more widely available, more people will use it, and then they'll feel the social pressure that more people are using it, so more people will use it, right?

Emily Klancher Merchant
Exactly. So we mentioned in the introduction this other form of passive eugenics, of using intelligence testing to sort people into jobs, potentially for higher education or other forms of career advancement. What do you think are the long-term repercussions that might extend even into today of that form of passive eugenics. 

Emily Klancher Merchant
Yeah, so I want to answer that question by taking a step back to think about what intelligence testing is actually evaluating because, you know, throughout everything that I've been saying, I've been kind of taking this term, intelligence, for granted. So in 1924, the psychologist Edwin Boring famously said, “Intelligence is what intelligence tests test.”

These days psychologists will tell you something different. They'll tell you that intelligence tests measure the capacity for abstract problem solving, but really it remains true that intelligence is “what intelligence tests test.” So then the question becomes, well, what do intelligence tests test? 

The first intelligence tests were developed in France in 1905, the idea was to identify children who had fallen behind in school so that they could receive remedial education and most likely catch up to their peers. When intelligence testing came to the United States that was when the psychologists who developed it and implemented it really saw it as a test of innate genetic ability. These were followers of Francis Galton so they're seeing intelligence through the biological model of socioeconomic status that I described earlier so they're really seeing intelligence as the capacity to achieve socioeconomic status. And so that's what intelligence tests tested. They were standardized on middle-class white children. And so some of the questions were very overtly about testing adherence to middle class norms and aesthetic preferences. And so what intelligence was at the time, what it was thought of, was the kind of biological capacity to achieve high socioeconomic status. And intelligence tests have changed over time, the kind of rationale for them has changed over time, but the ways that they've been standardized and implemented has continued to reflect those assumptions.

After World War I, intelligence testing became an industry. Psychologists sold intelligence tests to school districts, to businesses, and intelligence testing became the standard way of gatekeeping entrance into  educational opportunities, occupational placements, and so it was actually that kind of large-scale implementation of intelligence testing that further aligned high intelligence with high socioeconomic status. 

Susanna Smith

It’s so circular, I think, the logic of intelligence testing, of who can do well on intelligence tests, is who can move up the socioeconomic ladder, or at least achieve middle class. Which then, invariably means  the middle class is most likely to test well, slash potentially people who are higher class. 

Why are we still using intelligence testing today?

Emily Klancher Merchant
Why are we still using intelligence testing? That's a great question.
In the 1970s, intelligence testing became a target of the Civil Rights Movement. Opponents of intelligence testing, particularly civil rights advocates, saw that intelligence testing was really stacked against poorer children, children of color. It then tracked them into lower-level education tracks, which then kept them trapped into lower socioeconomic status categories. Companies began to use, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, companies began to use intelligence testing to do racial discrimination without overtly doing racial discrimination.

So intelligence testing became a target of the civil rights movement. It was challenged in court. Several states stopped using intelligence testing in their public educational programs. And the use of intelligence testing by employers was limited by the Supreme Court. And so, since then intelligence testing has not been used nearly as much as it had been before. 

Psychologists still value intelligence testing because it correlates with educational success and later life socioeconomic status, but as we've said, it does that for very circular reasons. It does that because the way that intelligence tests are standardized, kids with higher socioeconomic status score higher on intelligence tests, and then also have higher levels of educational and occupational success later in life.

One thing that intelligence tests are used for today is actually to measure impairment. So in the NFL, there have been, there's recently been a lot of concern about the head injuries that football players get causing cognitive damage. Intelligence testing is one way to measure the cognitive damage that football players have suffered. But, initially, when football players started receiving compensation for this cognitive damage the NFL assumed that white players started out with higher levels of intelligence than Black players. And so, yeah, and so white players did not need to show as much of a loss of IQ as Black players did in order to receive the same levels of compensation.

So, intelligence testing still gets used in… and I think that's been remedied but intelligence testing still gets used in very overtly racist ways today.

Susanna Smith

That's stunning. How could you even measure loss of anything if you don't measure the individual's starting point, whether you value intelligence testing or not?

Emily Klancher Merchant

Exactly, and they hadn't measured the starting point.

Susanna Smith

Wow, that's crazy. 

Susanna Smith

So you've written about in the field of sociogenomics there have been largely indeterminate findings so far, and you've said that this has fueled new eugenic projects. Can you talk a little bit more about what you mean by that?

Emily Klancher Merchant

Yeah, the new eugenic projects that I've been concerned with in my own research are those that use polygenic scores for educational attainment either to select embryos in the IVF process, as we just discussed or to allocate scarce resources. The history of science that leads up to these new eugenic projects and that underpins them is a history of scientists increasing awareness of genetic indeterminacy.

When intelligence testing was first developed at the beginning of the 20th century, the psychologists who brought it to the United States believed that IQ scores were entirely determined by genetics. Education scholars pushed back on those claims in the 1920s demonstrating that education could increase a person's IQ score. In response, psychologists embraced the concept of heritability, which quantified the proportion of variance in intelligence in the population that's due to genetic variation rather than environmental variation. Initially, they estimated that heritability number at about 80%.

So between the 1920s and the 1960s, the proportion of variance in intelligence that scientists attributed to genetics fell from 100% to 80%. 

In the 1970s, scientists found out that much of the data that had contributed to that 80% figure had been falsified so they had to collect new data, which reduced the estimate of the heritability of intelligence to about 50%. But by the end of the 20th century, it had also become clear that heritability estimates were not terribly meaningful.

Heritability estimation doesn't include any kind of analysis of DNA so even though scientists attributed 50% of the variation in intelligence to genetic variation they had no idea which genetic variants might be responsible.

After the completion of the Human Genome Project, scientists tried to identify specific genes that influenced intelligence but by 2012, they realized that this candidate gene approach just wasn't going to work. That's when scientists turned to genome-wide association studies, which are familiarly known as GWAS, so that's the acronym I'll be using. The problem with GWAS is that they required an enormous quantity of data, and there simply weren't enough data to power a GWAS of intelligence. So sociogenomicists shifted their attention to educational attainment. After about ten years, they were able to amass a dataset that included over three million people and we're able to find genetic variants that accounted for about 16% of the variants in educational attainment among white Americans. So now we've gone from a 50% figure for the heritability of intelligence at the beginning of the 20th century to only 16% of the variants being accounted for by actual genetic variants in 2022. But even that 16% included variants that simply correlate with a person's childhood environment and don't have any kind of biological effect on anything related to education. Once environment is held constant, genetic variance can account for only about 5% of the variance in educational attainment.

So over 125 years of research, belief in the complete genetic determination of intelligence has given way to a situation in which it now appears that upwards of 90% of the variation in educational attainment is probably environmental in origin. Yet also over the past 30 years or so, popular genetic determinism has grown. So even as the research has shown more and more indeterminacy, the general public and even scientists themselves cling tightly to the belief that more genetic influences on intelligence and education will soon be found. And it's this belief that fuels today's eugenic projects.

Susanna Smith

That's stunning, just sort of the complete turnaround in what we know scientifically about the heritability of intelligence even though scientists are increasingly finding that less and less of what we might call our intelligence is predicted by our genetic makeup. 

How do you think these ideas about who is smart or intelligent play out in how American society is structured and how it runs today?

Emily Klancher Merchant

The core idea behind eugenics is that the existing social structure is a product of nature that people have different abilities and that society has this kind of economic rationality that slots people with higher abilities into more important jobs that then get paid more. And so that is biology plus economics that is at the root of our existing social structure, so it's biological variation filtered through this kind of economic rationality. And eugenics always takes that economic rationality for granted. It's really just an unspoken assumption behind eugenics and then eugenics itself focuses on that biological variation. And so that' kind of, those are the scientific assumptions behind eugenics. And then the kind of political or policy implications of eugenics are that the only way to ameliorate poverty or to change the kind of social structure, social hierarchy is through selective breeding to increase people's abilities. 

Susanna Smith

And then what would that mean for people they view at the bottom of the eugenic hierarchy in terms of their ability to initiate changes in their lives or their children's future?

Emily Klancher Merchant

So the eugenic view is that there is no change except through selective breeding. And so, these eugenic ideas have justified a whole range of oppressive policies from institutionalization of people who were either poor or didn't conform to the kind of social expectations of the day and all of these things. So now I'm talking about, you know, a hundred years ago, all of these things were attributed to low intelligence, genetically determined low intelligence, supposedly so, eugenic projects have justified their institutionalization and they're forced or involuntary sterilization. And so the idea is that people who are thought to be genetically less capable either can be exploited for labor and prevented from contributing to the birth of future generations.

Susanna Smith

Yeah, I mean, it's a reinforcement of social inequality through biological explanation, incorrect science, but… 

Emily Klancher Merchant

Right, exactly. 

And histories of eugenics have really tended to focus on sterilization and how eugenicists have advocated for involuntary sterilization. Thirty-two states in the United States have had sterilization laws that allowed for the involuntary sterilization of people in certain categories, usually associated with well, the technical term at the time was “feeble-mindedness,” which was kind of a catch-all term for low intelligence, poverty, inability to conform to social expectations.

And so, thirty-two states had laws that allowed for involuntary sterilization and across the 20th century over 60,000 people were sterilized under those laws. And so the history of eugenics in the United States has really focused on sterilization and on these sterilization laws as a model for much harsher laws in Nazi Germany leading up to the Holocaust, which, of course, involved mass murder as well as sterilization.

More recently, historians have been looking at institutionalization of people deemed feeble-minded, and how that also worked into the eugenic project so institutionalization provided a means of social control. People could be controlled through the threat of potential institutionalization but also labor extraction. People in institutions were actually doing the work of making the institutions run and in some cases, actually made the institutions profitable through their labor. And so, historians have now started to look at the role of institutionalization.

So a couple of great books that do that are:

Pure America by Elizabeth Catte

Fixing the Poor by Molly Ladd-Taylor

And what hasn't been discussed as much in the historical scholarship is that eugenicists also expected people to internalize these eugenic norms and police their own reproduction because sterilization and institutionalization could only really affect people at the very, very extreme end of what was considered to be a spectrum of genetic ability.

And so, eugenesists also work to kind of educate the public about what they believed to be the genetic transmission of intelligence and socioeconomic status so that people could choose their family size according to eugenic principles, and choose their spouses according to eugenic principle. Eugenicists also lobbied for legislation that would have produced economic incentives for wealthier people to have more children and poorer people to have fewer children. And those kind of activities have been termed “passive eugenics,” because they were not actively promoting the reproduction of one group or suppressing the reproduction of another group.But that was a very important part of the American eugenics movement that's really been overlooked in the scientific literature. And that's really what we're seeing now in these new eugenic projects that focus on polygenic embryo screening as  really a tool for wealthy people to have more children but also to supposedly increase the intelligence of the children that they have. And so, people who think it will work worry that it will increase the class divide by actually increasing the intelligence of people who are already wealthy.

Susanna Smith

So, I want to back up to eugenics a bit and just pick your brain about something that I noticed during my graduate education, which is that in many history classes today, including the one I took on medical history you might get the impression that eugenics fell by the wayside in the United States after World War II. But in your view, what actually happened? 

Emily Klancher Merchant

Yeah, so, the American Eugenics movement experienced a generational split in the 1930s. The older eugenicists aligned with Nazism and race science but the younger generation didn't. Younger eugenicists recognized that the kind of intra-European racism at the heart of Madison Grant's 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, and at the heart of Nazi population policy had begun to fall out of favor in the United States after the passage of the 1924 immigration restriction laws. So these young eugenicists tried to purge the American eugenics movement of overt racism in order to maintain popular support for eugenics. And again, this is why it's important to distinguish between eugenics and racism and between biological classism and genetic racism. If we conflate eugenics with racism then we fall into the trap of classifying what the younger eugenicists were doing as not eugenics, but it very much was. 

These younger eugenicists, they continued to call themselves eugenicists, and they even argued that what the older eugenicists were doing and what the Nazi government was doing, that that was not eugenics. They saw themselves as the true eugenicists and the others as false claimants to the term. So, for the younger eugenicists, their eugenics focused on biological classism. Their aim, as I talked about a little bit earlier, was to increase births among wealthier Americans and reduce births among poorer Americans. They never disavowed involuntary sterilization, but they increasingly focused on efforts to get Americans to internalize eugenic norms and conduct their reproductive lives accordingly just as polygenic embryo selection does today. 

After World War II, the eugenics of the older generation was discredited, but the eugenics of the younger generation was not. We often hear that eugenics disappeared from the United States after World War II because organizations like the eugenics Record Office and the Human Betterment Foundation closed. But the American Eugenics Society, which was by then in the hands of the younger eugenicists, continued without changing its name until 1972. During the 25 years between the end of World War II and the organization's name change, the American Eugenics Society remained reputable. And it contributed to the development of new scientific fields, including demography, medical genetics, and behavior genetics. It was only in the 1970s that eugenics became indelibly linked to racism and the Holocaust in the American popular imaginary.

Susanna Smith

So, how would you describe how eugenics functions in American society, let's say since 1945 forward? Or even since 1970 forward? 

Emily Klancher Merchant

So between 1940 and 1970 eugenics, the word was still quite reputable. Scientists still used it to describe what they were doing, and these are scientists who largely disavowed racism. They still clung to some racist ideas, including related to genetics, but they disavowed racism. They said that what they were doing wasn't racism but they understood intelligence and socioeconomic status to have a biological basis. And they favored various policies and other mechanisms that would promote the reproduction of wealthier people at the expense of poorer people.

And then in the 1970s, largely as a result of the Civil Rights Movement, eugenics came to be. understood as inseparable from racism. So these scientists who had said“I'm a eugenicist but not a racist,” that position was no longer tenable. And so, it was really after the 1970s that eugenics became a very fringe view. Scientists who had previously aligned themselves with eugenics stopped using that word. 

This was actually very convenient for people who continue to advocate biological classism because they could say, “Oh no, we're just talking about socioeconomic status, we're just talking about differences between individuals, not differences between racial groups. So what we're doing is not eugenics. Eugenics is racism, it's group-level inequality. It's ascribing group-level inequality to biological difference.” And so biological classism was able to escape that label.

And, you know, the history that leads up to polygenic embryo selection also includes the history of assisted reproductive technologies, which I haven't been talking about. But reproductive medicine was across the 20th century, very closely aligned with eugenics. So fertility doctors very openly said that they were promoting eugenic aims, so up until the 1970s if somebody needed a sperm donor, it was the doctor who would select the donor. And they would often do it, select a donor explicitly with the person's intelligence in mind as a way to supposedly produce a more intelligent child. After the 1970s, fertility medicine became a consumer industry, so the sociologist Laura Mamo calls it “Fertility Inc.” Fertility medicine became a big business. It became a consumer industry but it still retained this eugenic focus. But now, eugenics by then, had become associated with racism. So, if the fertility industry was now focused on the intelligence or educational attainment of sperm or egg donors, that was no longer seen as eugenics. This redefinition of eugenics in the 1970s really allowed projects that had been previously understood as eugenics to escape critique, to continue on but escape critique. 

Susanna Smith

How do you see that playing out today?

Emily Klancher Merchant

Polygenic embryo screening is really, you know, just a more extreme form of older versions of eugenically oriented assisted reproductive technologies. Now, you're not choosing a sperm donor on the basis of their intelligence, you're choosing an embryo on the basis of its expected educational attainment or its expected intelligence. And, interestingly, some of the advocates of this kind of polygenic embryo screening, some of these advocates of this are now embracing the eugenic label. They're saying, “oh yeah, what we're doing is eugenics but really, all embryo selection is eugenics.” 

So people who are doing in vitro fertilization can choose to also do pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. This is not polygenic embryo screening. This involves testing embryos to see if they have any chromosomal anomalies or if they have specific genes that are known to cause disease.

And that's been kind of a routine part of in vitro fertilization for a long time. So now the advocates of polygenic embryo screening are saying, “oh yeah, this is eugenics, but that was also eugenics. And we're all eugenicists, and we just need to accept it and embrace it.”

But other folks, the folks who are advocating polygenic embryo selection, but saying that it's not eugenics, they're saying, “oh no, this is just, you know, individuals making individual choices on the basis of their own values in the privacy of a medical clinic,” and really trying to distance themselves from that eugenic label by associating eugenics with state control over reproduction, with involuntary sterilization, with racism and genocide.

But as we've seen in the history of eugenics that I've described here, eugenics always included both. It always included the individual internalization of eugenic norms and relying on individuals to make individual decisions that then would have an effect at the population level.

Susanna Smith

So, for our listeners, many of whom work in the field of genetics and genomics, or in clinical care, research, or academia, why do you think it's important for these professionals to think critically about conversations happening today about genetics and science in today's political climate?


Emily Klancher Merchant

I think it's more important than ever to think critically about the claims that are being made on behalf of eugenics to question who's making the claims, for what purpose, and on the basis of what evidence. So a lot of these claims are being made by people in the biotech industry who are selling a product, and that's really important to recognize.

We've seen recently a resurgence of the kind of overt genetic racism that had gone out of fashion in the previous century. And we've even seen a resurgence in older forms of scientific racism that focus on purity of blood rather than genetic frequencies. So, you know, genetic racism is just one form of scientific racism, and we're seeing the resurgence both of genetic racism and of other forms of scientific racism. And these ideas kind of take shape in anti-immigrant sentiment and in the pronatalist movement, which promotes reproduction in general, but especially among well-off conservative white Americans. But the trends leading toward polygenic embryo screening have been brewing for much longer. I was kind of getting at that with the commercialization of fertility medicine, but these trends include biological classism, which  s I suggested, has never been adequately challenged. It includes popular genetic determinism, which fueled and was fueled by the Human Genome Project of the 1990s. It also includes the rise of the biotech industry, which orients science toward the production of consumer products, like direct-to-consumer genetic testing and polygenic embryo screening. Influences also include the decline of the welfare state, which has increasingly made individuals responsible for managing their own medical risk and enhancing their own human capital. 

So while the current political climate has definitely made racism and eugenics great again. This process has been part and parcel of the rise of neoliberalism since the 1970s, so that's the rise of market fundamentalism, the hollowing out of the welfare state and really the focus on business and the private sector as the kind of organizational node for society. And science and medicine have never been independent of political, social, and economic institutions, so it's really important for scientists and medical professionals to understand the embeddedness of their own practices in those larger institutions.

Susanna Smith

Thank you, Professor Merchant, for joining me today on Genetic Frontiers. 

Emily Klancher Merchant

Oh, sure, thank you, Susanna. It's been great talking to you. 

Susanna Smith

For anyone listening who would like to learn more about Professor Merchant's work, please go to her website, which is emilyklancher.com, and it's linked to in our show notes.

Genetic Frontiers is co-produced by Brandy Mello and by me: Susanna Smith. Music is by Edward Giordano and design by Abhinav Chauhan and Julie Weinstein. Thank you for listening to this episode of Genetic Frontiers connect with us at geneticfrontiers.org or on Instagram and Linkedin at Genetic Frontiers, to continue the conversation.