One of Galton's followers was the German embryologist Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was a keen supporter of evolution. He came up with the idea {which later influenced Freud) that every animal re-lived its evolutionary past during its embryonic development. His interest in Galton and Darwin and his belief in inheritance as fate led him to found the Monist League, which had thousands of members before the First World War. It argued for the application of biological rules to society and for the survival of some races — those with the finest heritage — at the expense of others. Haeckel claimed social rules were the natural laws of heredity and adaptation. The evolutionary destiny of the Germans was to overcome inferior peoples: 'The Germans have deviated furthest from the common form of ape-like men.. The lower races are psychologically nearer to the animals than to civilized Europeans. We must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.¹

In 1900 the arms manufacturer Krupp offered a large prize for the best essay on 'What can the Theory of Evolution tell us about Domestic Political Development and the Legislation of the State?' There were sixty entries. In spite of the interests of capital, the first German eugenic sterilisation was carried out by a socialist doctor (albeit one who claimed that trade union leaders were more likely to be blond than were their followers).

While imprisoned after the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler read the standard German text on human genetics, The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene, by Eugene Fischer. Fischer was the director of the Berlin Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. One of his assistants, Joseph Mengele, later achieved a certain notoriety for his attempts to put G.iltonian ideas into practice. Fischer's book contained.1 chilling phrase: 'The question of the quality of our hm'iliury endowment' — it said — 'is a hundred times more import.nit than the dispute over capitalism or socialism,'

His thoughts were echoed 111 Mcin Kainpf: 'Whoever is not bodily and spiritually healthy and worthy shall not have the right to pass on his suffering in the body of his children'. Hitler took this to its dreadful conclusion with the murder of those he saw as less favoured in order to breed from the best. The task was taken seriously, with four hundred thousand sterilisations of those deemed unworthy to pass on their genes, sometimes by the secret use of X-rays as the victims filled in forms. Those in charge of the programme in Hamburg estimated that one fifth of its people deserved to be treated in this way.

By 1936 the German Society for Race Hygiene had more than sixty branches and doctorates in racial science were offered at several German universities. (!ert;iin peoples were, they claimed, inferior because or inheritance. Half of those at the Wannsee Conference (which decided on the final solution of the Jewish problem) had doctorates and many justified their crimes on scientific grounds. The eugenics movement in Germany was opposed to abortion {except of the unfit) and imposed stiff penalties — up to ten years in prison — on any doctor rash enough to carry it out. The number of children born to women of approved stock went up by a fifth. The Hitlerian conjunction of extreme right wing views, an obsession with racial purity and a hatred of abortion has its echoes today.

Concern for the purity of German blood reached absurd lengths. One unfortunate member of the National Socialist Party received a transfusion from a Jew after he had been in a road accident. I le was brought before a disciplinary court to see if he should hci'Mlmlrd from the Party. Fortunately, the donor had fought in the lust World War, so that his Jewish red cells were — just about — acceptable.

The disaster of the Nazi experiment ended the eugenics movement, at least in its primitive form. Its blemished past means that human genetics is marked by the fingerprints of its own history. It sometimes seems to find them hard to wipe off. They should not be forgotten now that the subject is, for the first time, in a position to control the biological future.

Galton and his followers felt free to invent a science which accorded with their own prejudices. They believed that the duty to genes outweighs that to those who bear them. They were filled with extraordinary seif-assurance and great weight was placed on their views although in retrospect it is obvious that they knew almost nothing.

Today's new knowledge is as controversial as was the old ignorance. Even so, disputes among modern biologists are not about the vague general issues that obsessed their predecessors. Instead they concern themselves with the fate of individuals rather than of all humanity. Genetics has become a science and, as such, has narrowed its horizons.

Nevertheless, it raises ethical issues which will not go away. The newspapers are filled with debates about the morals of gene therapy or of human cloning, neither of which show any sign of becoming a reality. However, the diagnosis of defective genes before birth has already shifted the balance between birth and abortion to reduce the number of damaged children. This raises passions, from those who feel — in spite of the high natural wastage of fertilised eggs — that all foetuses are sacred, to others who consider that to pass on a faulty gene is equivalent to child abuse. Genetics presents a more universal difficulty — the problem of knowledge. Soon, it will tel! many of us how and when we may die. Alie.uly, ir is possible to diagnose at birth genes which will kill in childhood, youth or middle age. More will soon be louml. Will people want to know that they are at risk of;i disease which cannot be treated? Many genes show their etleus in those who inherit damaged DNA from each parent. As everyone is likely to pass on a single copy of at least one such gene, will this help to choose a partner or to decide whet her to have children? Attitudes to inborn disease arc flexible. In Ghana, babies are sometimes born with an extra finger or toe. Some tribal groups take no notice, others rejoice as it means that the new member of the family will become rich; but others, just a few miles away, regard such children with horror and they are drowned at birth. Even Christianity has seen the genetically unfortunate as less than human. Martin Luther himself declared that Siamese twins were monsters without a soul. Attitudes to genetics will always be influenced by those to abortion, which vary with time and place. St Augustine saw a foetus as part of its mother and not worthy of protection and in spite of its present views the Catholic Church did not condemn abortion until the thirteenth century. Ireland has a constitutional clause that establishes the right to life of the unborn child; while across the Irish Sea abortion until the third month is available almost on demand. Embryo research (which is becoming important with the discovery that embryonic cells can be used to treat adult disease) is forbidden in Germany but lightly controlled in Britain. AH this shows how hard it is to set ethical limits to the new biology.

The problem can be illustrated with some old-fashioned biological discrimination. There has always been prejudice against certain genes, those carried on the chromosomes that determine sex. Women have two 'X' chromosomes, men a single X chromosome and a much smaller *Y\ All eggs have an X but that of sperm.ire of two kinds, X or Y. At fertilisation, both XY males and XX females are produced in equal number. Sex is as much;i product of genes as are blood groups.