This has come up before, with disbelief I might add so hopefully this one instance will offer at least some clarification
Violence, Genes, and Prejudice | DiscoverMagazine.com
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"Researchers," the brochure began, "have already begun to study the genetic regulation of violent and impulsive behavior and to search for genetic markers associated with criminal conduct." It went on to point out that genetic research had gained impetus from "the apparent failure of environmental approaches to crime--deterrence, diversion, and rehabilitation--to affect the dramatic increases in crime" and that such research "holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct, of isolating environmental features which trigger those predispositions, and of treating some predispositions with drugs and unintrusive therapies."
Sullivan, still bailing out a boat quickly sinking from sight, said his Violence Initiative had no connection with Wasserman's conference, even though the conference was funded by the NIH (an agency for which Sullivan, as secretary of health and human services, was ultimately responsible). But some critics immediately put the two together as evidence of a deepening conspiracy, with blacks and Hispanics as the likely targets. Children would be screened for genes that made them prone to crime, they warned, and given sedating drugs.
Among the more enraged critics was Samuel Yette, an author and former Howard University journalism professor. Yette, who is black, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the conference would encourage the impression that blacks are born criminals. "It is an effort," he said, "to use public money for a genocidal effort against African Americans." White critics also invoked the specter of eugenics. In a letter to the New York Times, Norman Finkelstein of New York University pointed out that earlier this century eugenicists' theories linking criminality to genes--in this case to genes for "feeblemindedness" and "moral degeneracy"--had resulted in up to 30 states adopting forced-sterilization laws. "In 1927," wrote Finkelstein, "the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sterilization, with Associate Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declaring 'it is far better for all the world if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime . . . society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.' " According to Finkelstein, more than 35,000 Americans were sterilized before World War II. "Germany," he noted, "did not pass such a law until 1933, and German eugenicists then stated they owed a great debt to the American precedent."
But the most visible--some would say publicity-seeking--critic of the project was Peter Breggin, a white psychiatrist and activist well known for opposing the use of drugs to treat psychiatric problems. In a story headlined Plot to Sedate Black Youth, which ran in a small black newspaper in Washington, D.C., Breggin and fellow opponents implied that the gene studies slated for discussion at the conference formed the core of a massive social engineering scheme. A plan was afoot, they said, to identify potentially violent inner-city children on the basis of biological and genetic markers--paving the way for psychiatric intervention, including the widespread medication of black children. Breggin later repeated his views on a news show on Black Entertainment Television and led the attack against the conference through his organization, the Center for the Study of Psychiatry. In July 1992 the NIH, which had given Wasserman $78,400 to fund the conference the following October, withdrew its support.
But the fight was far from over. "This is political correctness," blasted Gary Stephenson, an official at the University of Maryland, where the conference was to be held. "Just having such a conference doesn't mean the university endorses racism or sexism," he told the New York Times. "The university provides an open forum for debate on controversial issues."
Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wasserman pointed out that the language of the controversial brochure was taken straight from the proposal he'd submitted requesting NIH funds for the meeting, which the NIH had rated "superb." In fact, the proposed meeting was praised for the diversity of its speakers, who ranged from those who believed genes play a role in violence to those worried about the legitimization of a link that was as yet unproved.
Showing a steely will, Wasserman did not shrink in the face of accusations of racism. Scientists doing this work, he said, were interested in understanding individual susceptibility to violence, not in exploiting alleged racial traits. "Several researchers at the conference would have dismissed the claim that one racial group is more predisposed genetically to crime than another as unsupported and inherently implausible," Wasserman wrote in his Chronicle article. "They would have argued that racial differences in crime rates were explained by powerful environmental factors." Though some researchers (not invited to the conference) claim that such racial differences are genetic, he continued, "their research is regarded as flimsy, even by strong proponents of individual genetic predispositions."
Wasserman concluded: "In sponsoring a debate on individual, but not racial, differences in genetic predisposition to criminal behavior, I believe that I have drawn a defensible line." In another publication, Black Issues in Higher Education, he added that the decision to cancel the conference was "not formed out of concern for the black community" but for political reasons. "This is an election year, remember, and the Bush people are very sensitive."
The op-ed tide began to run the other way. Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the University of Minnesota, wrote in Baltimore's Evening Sun: "In plain English," NIH director Bernadine Healy "yanked the funds because some people told her the topic of the genetics of crime is politically incorrect." An editorial in the Journal of NIH Research accused health and human services officials of a "lack of political courage . . . at a time when violence and crime dominate American life." The editorial went on: "At the heart of the controversy is a deep-seated fear of discovering that human behaviors, even violent ones, have biological roots. . . .What would we do with such information? The canceled Maryland conference was to address issues such as this." Five months after the NIH pulled its support for the conference, its grant appeals board ruled 7-2 to reinstate it. The conference is now tentatively scheduled for next October.
And what of the Violence Initiative? Though the name itself was dropped as a political embarrassment, the research it embraced essentially continues. In 1992 the federal government spent $53.7 million on NIH-funded violence studies. This year a panel of scientists, ethicists, and attorneys recommended substantially increasing the current $58 million budget. "Violence," the panel wrote in its April report to Harold Varmus, present director of the NIH, "is one of the leading causes of death and disability in our Nation." Its consequences exact "an extraordinarily heavy toll on our Nation's youth and elderly, and . . . disproportionately affect minority populations."
Looking back on the furor, Sullivan expresses no anger but rather a battle-weary sadness. "The thing in the background that really contributed to suspicions was Tuskegee," he reflects, referring to "a horrendous, inappropriate study" that began in rural Alabama in the 1930s. The Tuskegee study was a travesty of American public-health research. For decades 400 black men with syphilis were given what amounted to sham treatment so doctors could track the disease's unchecked progress. The study, which was halted under protest in 1972, left a sour taste in the black community. "Some say that AIDS was a disease developed in the lab to harm black people," notes Sullivan. "There is that lingering fear that somehow the government is plotting against its citizens to do some evil thing, which is unfortunate. It has slowed things tremendously."
Who could disagree? Lots of people, and passionately.
There's good reason to be wary of the way genetic findings are applied to society, says Troy Duster, director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California at Berkeley. Duster, who is black, points out that past attempts to link inherited traits to criminal behavior have never held up. Recently, though, molecular biology has revolutionized genetics. "We can screen an individual's genes at the molecular level to see who's at risk for devastating medical disorders like Tay-Sachs, sickle-cell anemia, and cystic fibrosis," says Duster. "And these breakthroughs have created an unjustified halo effect for geneticists trying to explain behavior." The success of medical genetics shouldn't dazzle us into being uncritical about the pitfalls of behavioral genetics, he points out. Unlike, say, Tay-Sachs, which can be blamed on a single aberrant gene, violent behavior is likely to be the result of a fantastically intricate web of interactions among many genes and varying environments.
In his book, Backdoor to Eugenics, Duster argues that there are dangers in the way the public debate about genetics tends to be framed. On the one hand there are "experts (geneticists, medical specialists, researchers, etc.)" and on the other hand there are "critics who have been portrayed as naysayers and know-nothings, Luddites who would put their heads in the sand or try to stop the machinery of progress." As a result, he says, the typical citizen will always go along with the experts, just as "good Germans" went along with Nazi policies because they couldn't believe their leaders would start "selective extermination" of Jews and the mentally ill. In a similar vein, Duster fears that if the public buys the idea of "susceptibility genes" for violence, doesn't think to question their predictive power, and doesn't look out for their potential for abuse, then these genes could be used as a rationalization for political oppression of blacks.
Breggin goes even further. "This so-called scientific focus on violence in America basically means a focus on African Americans," he states. "What people are frightened about is little black children who are seen as having the seeds of destruction in them. Researchers are not looking to see if George Bush and his ne'er-do-well sons have bad genes. White people are looking at the victims of racism and saying something is wrong with them. But as soon as you say something is scientific, people get fooled. The argument used to be that blacks were docile and hence biologically predisposed to slavery. Now, in a few generations, they're supposed to be genetically predisposed to rebellion. This is not science. Evolution can't possibly work that fast. This is the use of psychiatry and science in the interest of racist social policy."
In the summer of 1992 Breggin, who is Jewish, personally appealed to Wasserman, who is also Jewish, to understand the dangers of holding a conference exploring genetics and violence. As Breggin describes it, they met by accident in a Bethesda pizza parlor. Breggin asked Wasserman how he would feel about a conference on "Genetic Factors in Junk Bond Dealing" at a time of public concern over the misdeeds of Michael Milkin and Ivan Boesky, who also happen to be Jewish.
Wasserman now dismisses Breggin as a "zealot." He notes that Breggin was the first to raise the specter of government-condoned, wide- scale medication of minority children. "Peter Breggin has a lot of chutzpah," says Wasserman, referring to Breggin's jump from genetic research on individual susceptibility to the use of drugs in a whole group of kids. "He made the leap, then decried it as racist."
In the past year, taking heed of all the criticism, the NIH has set up panels to review and provide guidance for its research on aggressive and antisocial behavior. Breggin, though, wasn't invited to sit on them. That job has fallen to a growing number of minority academics who are not necessarily opposed to the research but who want to be sure they have some say about the direction of the inquiry and how its results are presented to the public.
"There are few black biomedical scientists doing research, let alone this kind of research," points out Willie Pearson, a black sociologist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; like Duster, he serves as an NIH reviewer. "So the first question becomes: Just who is doing the research, and how do you deal with the findings? What policy do you impose--and who is in on that policy? You can't assume that scientists are going to be objective. Science is not above being socialized, and people design research to fit their own paradigm. So I'm supportive of continuing gene research as long as it's reviewed by a more balanced group."
The second question that concerns Pearson is "whether this science is a rationalization for maintaining the status quo. Is it a legitimization for high arrest rates in black people? We don't need science that looks at America and says blacks and Hispanics have a high rate of homicide, so something must be biologically wrong with blacks and Hispanics."
That's a question that also concerns Richard Moran, a criminologist at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. The idea that violent and criminal people are biologically flawed has a long history, he says. It extends back to Aristotle, "who believed that people came to look like particular animals and had that animal's traits--so sneaky people looked like weasels." In the late 1800s, inspired by Darwin, Italian physician Cesare Lombroso began measuring the heads, ears, feet, and jaws of convicts in an attempt to show that criminals were evolutionarily closer to animals than other humans. And at the turn of the century English physician Charles Goring--on the basis of his own measurements of convicts and university students--concluded that "in every class and occupation of life it is feeble mind and the inferior forms of physique which tend to be selected for a criminal career."
Moran thinks current research exploring genes and violence demonstrates the resilience of our fascination for studying criminals as a distinct biological subspecies. "The definition of the criminal offender has changed from someone who has done bad (morally guilty conduct) to someone who is bad or defective," he wrote in a set of essays called Deviance and Medicalization. His sentiment is shared by Jerry Miller, a leading criminologist who runs the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives in Alexandria, Virginia. "We have given up looking to social and environmental causes; that is passé," claims Miller. "And we have given up trying social and environmental solutions; we have said rehabilitation does not work. So what's left? Flawed people--and many of those people in jail are black." Miller fears that conservatives are looking for a reason to ignore social issues so they can launch a war against a "dehumanized and demonized 'enemy,' who too often these days turns out to have a black face."
Are there any voices of consensus amid this cacophony?
Diana Fishbein, a criminologist at the University of Baltimore, is all too familiar with the fear of urban crime. But she is also, as she puts it, "an integrationist. I believe very much in an interaction between the environment and genetic susceptibilities. That is to say, nobody is predestined to be violent. Nobody is predestined to be a criminal. But given a certain environment and a certain genetic predisposition, then the risk of violence can increase."