CHAPTER 9
“Things Which Have Never
Been Done”
Eugenics and Clonal Dynasties
“We do terrible things for the people we love.
Stop asking why. Start asking who.”
—Beth, “Certain Agony of the Battlefield,”
season three, episode six
As the philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” To which we might add, “Those who never learned what happened in the past are even more condemned to repeat it.”
If you are like most people, you associate state-coerced eugenics—a movement that aimed to improve the population via selective breeding and included compulsory sterilization of “unfit” men and women—with evil physicians under the Nazi regime in Germany. So you might have been surprised when, in season two, Orphan Black referenced North American eugenics institutes and their programs by introducing the Cold River Institute and its “Better Baby” photos. But Orphan Black is correct in implying that eugenics did not originate in Germany or even in Europe, because, in fact, eugenics started in North America. And just as it was practiced in Nazi Germany to sterilize “unfit” people, so it was used in Canada and the United States.
The North American eugenics movement peaked between 1905 and 1935, but continued much later than people realize; eugenic practices continued until 1972 in North Carolina and Alberta, Canada. (Outside of North America, mandatory sterilization of certain people deemed unfit continued in Sweden, amazingly, until 2011.) Similarly, we learn in Orphan Black that the secret projects of Cold River were officially shut down in the 1970s, yet “some continued even after that”—such as Project Leda.
Eugenics relates to cloning humans and Orphan Black in a straightforward way. As soon as you start cloning genes, you are immediately forced to make a choice: Who do you use as a source? Rather than letting Nature or God decide which combination of genes becomes a person, some humans now do so. And as soon as that choice is in human hands, we naturally start choosing against ancestors with terrible genetic diseases . . . and then it is not too far a leap from that to start choosing for other, more subjective reasons, such as choosing the best possible ancestor. As soon as you start talking about “the best possible ancestor” and rejecting certain people as ancestors, you enter the territory of historical eugenics.
So let’s go back in history to learn a little about how eugenics began in North America—and then look at how that relates to cloning and Orphan Black.
EUGENICS AND STERILIZATION
In the late 1880s, Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton coined the word eugenics from the ancient Greek words eu (good) and genos (birth, origin).
We all remember Darwin for his theory of evolution. One of the best-known elements of that theory is the concept of “survival of the fittest” (the term that scientist and Darwin contemporary Herbert Spencer used to describe natural selection) as meaning survival of the best adapted; the word fit referred to the adaptation of an organism to its environment, especially in terms of reproduction. An organism’s fitness was a measure of the number of offspring it had that survived long enough to reproduce.
From this biological Darwinism, however, arose social Darwinism, a very different theory and the basis of eugenics (as well as the source of most of eugenics’ ethical and political problems). Social Darwinists mistakenly saw evolution in terms of competition among social groups rather than among individual organisms. Mostly well-off WASPs (like Dr. Leekie and Rachel Duncan), social Darwinists believed that their social advantages stemmed from an innate biological superiority over Africans, Asians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Italians, Irish Catholics, and everyone else. In other words, champions of social Darwinism saw themselves as the most fit—which they interpreted to mean that to improve humanity, they alone should be able to breed and bequeath their genes to future humans, and members of other, less fit groups (whether other races or the mentally or physically handicapped) should not. “Survival of the fittest” went from being a description of a process to a prescription for action and a moral imperative. As social Darwinist and prominent New York urologist William Robinson proclaimed in 1910 about the mentally challenged, “It is the acme of stupidity to talk in such cases of individual liberty, of the rights of the individual....They have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.”
So as you see, the efforts to sterilize the Project Leda clones, and ensure the same for any women who had sex with the Project Castor clones—thus preventing both sets of clones from reproducing—are not so far-fetched as they might seem . . . especially given their origins in the show’s Cold River Institute.
In Orphan Black, Sarah finds papers about Ethan and Susan Duncan’s work in the archives of an old church referring to this fictional institute. But its name is a reference to the location of North America’s real eugenics headquarters, at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York. Charles Davenport, who like Dr. Leekie regarded genetic improvement of humans as a new kind of secular religion, persuaded the Carnegie Institute and, later, Mrs. E. H. Harriman, the widow of a railroad executive and one of the richest women in America, to fund the Station for Experimental Evolution, which maintained a Eugenics Record Office from 1904 to 1939.
From its beginning in 1910, the Station was run by geneticist Harry H. Laughlin, who from his post championed laws to restrict immigration from “inferior” countries and to sterilize “genetic defectives.” He had his marching orders from Mrs. Harriman and Davenport, who shared his views.
Eugenics was popular because of a widespread racism during the early 1900s that was so deep and vile as to be almost unbelievable today. The newspaper magnate William Hearst and Theodore Roosevelt thundered against “yellow niggers” who had invaded America from Asia. When Henry Ford ran for president in the 1920s, he promised to rid America of “Jew bankers,” whom he accused of causing America to enter World War I and who later, he claimed, caused the Depression.
Most people know that the Nazis sterilized 225,000 “mental defectives,” but the American government also sterilized such people. Indiana required sterilization in 1907 of the “retarded and criminally insane,” and thirty other states soon followed, led by California and Virginia. By 1941, 36,000 Americans had been sterilized, sometimes for a vague condition called “feeblemindedness” or just for being born into large families on welfare. In 2012, we learned that North Carolina sterilized 7,600 Carolinians between 1929 and 1972. In 2014, North Carolina legislators decided to compensate the seventy-two living victims.
One of the most infamous cases of forced sterilization was that of Carrie Buck. Supposedly mentally challenged like her mother, Carrie Buck had been committed at age seventeen to a state mental institution in Virginia. After being raped by her cousin during a visit home, Carrie gave birth inside the institute to a daughter (who was later determined to be of completely normal intelligence). The State of Virginia then petitioned to have Carrie sterilized because her behavior inside the institution was considered “incorrigible.”
Charles Laughlin read one social worker’s report that Carrie had a “feeble look” (a catch-all phrase for any sort of mental problem) and concluded, without ever meeting her, that Carrie’s low intelligence was hereditary. Laughlin then declared that Carrie “lived a life of immorality and prostitution,” and that all the Bucks belonged to the “shiftless, ignorant, worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” Despite a challenge from Carrie’s court-appointed guardian, the US Supreme Court in 1927 upheld, in Buck v. Bell, the Virginia law permitting Carrie Buck’s sterilization. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority opinion in words that seem shocking today, but demonstrate how ingrained eugenics was in politics and law:
It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes . . . three generations of imbeciles are enough.
What is amazing, of course, is that this outrageously strong language by Justice Holmes was used to justify invading the body of a rape victim against her will—a woman who was also, by all later accounts, of perfectly normal intelligence—and cutting her Fallopian tubes to permanently sterilize her so she could never have the children she wanted.
Eugenics also motivated the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which restricted entry to America of “inferior” peoples from Asia, Africa, Greece, Ireland, Poland, and Italy, and promoted entry by English, Dutch, Scotch, Scandinavians, and Germans. President Calvin Coolidge, who as vice president had said, “America must be kept American. Biological laws show . . . that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races,” enthusiastically signed this act into law.
While the Statue of Liberty today symbolizes freedom, after 1924 thousands of the world’s “huddled masses” had only a glimpse of it before they were sent back to their original countries. And although today we use the phrase “melting pot” positively, in 1924 the phrase scared Americans who were concerned they were being overwhelmed by too many immigrants from strange countries (a phenomenon going on today in France, Greece, Italy, and Scandinavia, which historically have had immigration policies very favorable to people fleeing war and poverty around the Mediterranean Sea or from Africa).
Canada’s provinces of Alberta and British Columbia acted much like their American counterparts. The Alberta Sterilization Act of 1928 resulted in the compulsory sterilization of over three thousand “unfit” Canadians between its passing and 2012, when a group of fifty Canadians were the last to be so sterilized. Children of minorities (e.g., children of First Nations peoples) and those institutionalized were the groups most likely to be involuntarily sterilized. Many of these facts about Canada only came to light after a woman named Leilani Muir learned that she had been sterilized in her youth and successfully sued the Canadian government for damages, along the way forcing the country’s western provinces to reveal their eugenic past.
After the mid-1930s, eugenics declined in the United States. Geneticist Hermann J. Muller called it “hopelessly perverted,” a cult for “advocates for race and class prejudice, defenders of vested interests of church and State, Fascists, Hitlerites, and reactionaries generally.”
One of the most renowned American geneticists of the early twentieth century was J. B. S. Haldane—who was also godfather of the modern transhumanist movement, which shares with eugenics a desire to improve the genetic stock of humanity, and is the basis for Neolutionism in Orphan Black. Eventually, eugenics became so nonsensical that Haldane himself spoke out against it as it was being practiced: “Many of the deeds done in America in the name of eugenics are about as much justified by science as were the proceedings of the Inquisition by the Gospels.” Advances in population genetics prompted Haldane to famously remark, in criticizing eugenicists of his age, “An ounce of algebra is worth a ton of verbal argument.”
EUGENICS’ BAD SCIENCE
What were these false ideas on which proponents of eugenics based their actions?
First, they believed the reductionist assumption that social traits are caused by individual genes—that it is a single gene that causes a woman to be a prostitute, a child to be retarded, a family to be on welfare, or a robber to turn to crime.
Although single genes cause some conditions, such as Huntington’s disease, this is rare. Most diseases and traits, if affected by genetics at all, are caused by a multitude of genes acting together (more on this in chapter twelve). And becoming a criminal or a prostitute involves decisions of people, not just biology.
Second, eugenics supporters did not understand recessive inheritance. Two people who do not express a trait or disease but each carry a gene for it can have a child who has two copies of the gene and thus does express it. So the sterilization of everyone with, say, cystic fibrosis will not succeed in eliminating the disease, because two carriers who don’t manifest the disease could still produce a child with it (in fact, this is typically the case).
Third, eugenics supporters acted from a simplistic concept of evolution, one that assumed it would require only a few generations to wipe out inherited diseases. It took humans millions of years to evolve from the first vertebrates and from the first primates. Evolution paints its pictures on a canvas of billions of reproductive acts occurring over hundreds of millions of years, a picture exponentially more complex than that painted by eugenics (or Neolutionists).
Fourth, eugenicists were ignorant of environmental effects on gene expression. How a gene, or a combination of genes, is expressed depends partly on one’s environment: what happens during gestation, in early childhood, and so on. Genes have a fanlike range of expression, called their “norm of reaction.” Let’s say a particular combination of genes creates a brown squirrel with a yellow streak across his tail. Depending on what the squirrel’s mother ate during gestation, that particular combination of genes might produce a squirrel with a large streak or a small one that was a little yellow or bright yellow.
Fifth, eugenics was also ignorant of the role of mutations and chromosomal breakage in disease and developmental disabilities. Eugenicists mistakenly believed that if all mentally challenged people could be prevented from reproducing, their condition could be eliminated from the gene pool. But, due in part to chromosomal breakage, all women over thirty-five run a greater risk of having a child born with Down syndrome or other genetic conditions.
Finally, eugenicists did not understand population genetics, which is also relevant to debates today about human cloning. Eugenicists hoped to perfect humanity through selective breeding, but population genetics predicts a regression to the mean, the inherent tendency in stable populations over time to express the mean (average) value. In vast populations of humans, the “pull” of billions of new births will normalize any deviant values.
Similarly—unless the state were to control who had sex with whom, and thus how and why women get pregnant and bear children—no matter how many seven-foot-tall humans were cloned, after breeding with normal humans for a few generations, their children would be born of normal height.
Population genetics also shows the stupidity of the idea of “self-directed evolution” and enhancement espoused by Orphan Black’s Neolutionists. Even if you could modify your genes to, say, become seven feet tall, and even if you could do so in a way that was inheritable by your descendants (a much riskier proposition), those genes almost certainly would not pass into the general population.
Why Chosen Evolution Through Cloning
(Previously) Great People Is Risky
Like eugenics, the desire to clone the genes of great people arises from a desire to produce better, more fit children—to improve humanity. This could easily be a stated goal of the Dyad Institute or Topside. But as the example of cloning great people shows, making genetic choices based on the gene expression of living individuals far from guarantees a child’s fitness. So such a goal may be as poorly based in science as the past eugenics movement was.
If we ever can safely recreate the genotype of a great historical person, we will be able to answer an interesting question that was the crux of Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle’s theory of history. Carlyle argued that history’s big events were shaped by great men—men such as Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Alcibiades, to whom we might also add Adolf Hitler. But are great men great because their genetic nature in and of itself compels them to rise to the top, or are they merely the right DNA (or genotype) molded to the right expression of those genes (or phenotype), appearing at the right time in history in the right place?
In short, would a great man be really great again? Would the genotype of Napoleon be a great general, or financier, or just a megalomaniac who ends up in Leavenworth federal prison?
Actually, this question must be separated into two parts: First, would such a man be great, and second, would he be good in the same way, for the same reasons, and for the same people?
These are questions that are not easy to answer, in part because whether a particular man’s contribution to a particular society at a particular time and place in history is “good” is relative. Take, again, Napoleon. Was he good or bad for Europe?
As well, recreating the genotype of an ancestor tells us nothing of how that new human would feel and act. Even if we were able to recreate genius—even if the genotype of a Galileo or a Leonardo da Vinci were to again result in a person of extraordinary talents, which is not itself a foregone conclusion—we cannot guarantee that the genius will use those talents for human good. Especially because the new person will have free will, we cannot guarantee any result from recreating his or her genotype.
Because we know genetic essentialism is false, we know that the new person will differ from the ancestor. A person originated from the genes of Gandhi could be very violent; one from those of Mother Theresa, an indulgent narcissist. A rebellious teenage clone might turn against the expectations he received along with his famous genes and form his adult character in such resistance. There are simply no guarantees.
So it would be a gamble to produce a dozen progeny of a modern chemist as brilliant as Robert Boyle. We might get some dedicated to using chemistry to cleaning up the environment or making wonderful drugs to kill cancer, but we might also get others who created synthetic heroin that could be sold for pennies.
FAMILY-DIRECTED EVOLUTION
But wait! There is another possibility here, one that scares egalitarians and that is far more real. What if Neolutionists could achieve their goal of self-directed evolution not through individuals but through families? What if the families themselves were not duped, but willingly involved? Is that so crazy?
Maybe not. Consider that just by sexual reproduction, NFL quarterback Archie Manning produced two sons who are now also winning NFL quarterbacks, Peyton and Eli. If Peyton Manning also wanted a great quarterback for a son and was able to clone his genotype, it is easy to believe his clone son would also become a star. (No one would clone the genes of Archie’s oldest son, Cooper, whose NFL hopes were dashed by a diagnosis of spinal stenosis.)
Let’s consider the example of height again. As regression to the mean tells us, even if you could successfully change your genes and germ cells to become seven feet tall and produce children who were seven feet tall, if your seven-foot-tall descendants married people of normal height, your grandchildren and their children would be normal height. On the other hand, if you originated children by cloning, in a family line over several generations, you could in fact create a line of descendants who were all seven feet tall—a cloning-based biological dynasty.
Consider a different example, a hypothetical Adorno family that owns a lot of property in Italy. Each generation has handed down more property to the next, such that today, the family controls billions of dollars. Suppose parents clone the most successful current Adorno real estate investors and then each subsequent generation does the same. In a few generations, the Adorno investors might be so shrewd, so canny, so skilled that they could control all of Italy. Other families might pursue perfection in singing opera, or chess, or physics, but one thing seems certain: If an already successful family chooses to clone its best genotypes and gives its cloned children the best training from an early age, that family will likely be very successful.
Would this be such a bad thing? Well, maybe for society, especially according to those who equate inequality with injustice. John Rawls, the Harvard philosopher and noted egalitarian, wrote in his widely cited Theory of Justice that the family contains the greatest sources of injustice, as it will funnel all its resources into advancing the success of its own children while spending virtually nothing on the children of distant strangers.
Many families decide to straighten the teeth of their children with expensive braces. Many spend a great amount of time and money shepherding their children to computer camps, soccer games, and coaching sessions for standardized tests. Can we not extrapolate from these desires to advantage one’s own children to further, less superficial enhancements? Is it not inevitable that parents who had the financial resources might seek biological advantages, if available, for their children—ones that could be passed on to their grandchildren as well? For example, suppose Uncle Dewey was fabulously smart, industrious, loved by everyone, and rich. Some families might use Uncle Dewey as an ancestral source for some of their future, cloned children.
When reproductive cloning becomes safe, and when children of the most powerful families in the world— families who know the personal numbers of senators and whose corporations employ professional lobbyists—are infertile, do we really think we can prevent such families from lobbying to create legal ways to reproduce their genes through cloning? Or, if cloning is illegal in North America, from finding another country that allows them to do so? Do we really believe we can prevent scientists everywhere from creating, studying, and manipulating cloned human embryos? Or from studying them with an eye to fixing problems in reproductive cloning? No one can really control who has children, where, and how. And once such cloning is possible, it is easy to imagine some scientist somewhere offering his services to a rich family that wanted superior offspring.
Those at the head of Topside seem exactly to be such rich and powerful families who get what they want. They also subscribe to a transhumanist/Neolutionist ideology that makes them ripe to use cloning and genetic selection to advance their beliefs in the creation of their own children and grandchildren.
Far-fetched? Consider that a middle-class veterinarian in Louisiana made news when he spent $100,000 to clone two copies of his beloved dog. He reports being very satisfied with the result, although the first attempt at a clone died at birth. Should he have spent his money on other things? Well, he had already spent the same amount buying a Humvee, which some people might also criticize, but we generally allow people to spend their own money as they choose.
Of course, cloned human adults would not look or act any different than any other adults and would likely fit unnoticed into families. Early on, in order to protect the secret, astute family might not tell such children of their unique origins and be careful never to have more than twins from one ancestral genotype. Over time, however, descent from a famous ancestor might not only be revealed to the child, but become a source of pride to him or her.
It is hard to ignore the fact that smart, beautiful, healthy people possess many advantages in competing for the prizes of life. And children whose parents chose to give them those advantages might feel even more special. Rather than, “Yech, I’m a clone!” it will be, “I’m a clone. You are only normal.”
Why might cloning successfully result in such humanity-improving dynasty building, when state-coerced eugenics failed? First, such families already exert enormous control over their children’s marriages and childbearing. Some upper-caste Indian families still arrange marriages for their sons and daughters to other upper-caste children with good prospects and good ancestors. Second, some families already heavily invest in their children, especially in the form of education, often making sure they speak several languages and excel in math, science, finance, and communication skills.
BIOLOGICAL INEQUALITY AND CLONAL DYNASTIES
All of this raises a very important ethical question: Should we try to prevent the wealthy and powerful from using cloning to create biologically superior offspring, lest the result intensify social inequality? Right now, no form of assisted reproduction or cloning can be used to create a Thoroughbred racing horse. Should the same be done to protect our current, rough equality in developed countries? Should democracies fear groups like Topside and its aims?
Where early twentieth-century eugenics was unscientific, public, and coercive, this new option is more science based, private, and voluntary. It is called “stealth eugenics” in bioethics.
If we equate justice with equality, it is certainly true that North America has become a more unjust society over the last decades. In America, financial inequality has worsened over this time. There are more poor Americans than ever before, and the income of middle-class Americans has stagnated so much that “middle class” seems like a misnomer. Meanwhile, the number of billionaires continues to increase, as do the income and wealth of the top 1 percent of Americans. Add to that the inequality of inheritance, where some children inherit $1 million at birth or, like Donald Trump, get jobs through nepotism that enable them to make $1 million on their first business deal, and you realize that the deck is stacked. Biotech is quite likely to give rich children even more advantages.
It is worth ending here with the huge controversy that rages in the important field of early childhood education as to whether we can do anything at all to help poor children overcome the natural inequalities of genetics—one that engages with an ongoing debate on the impact of nature, or genes, versus nurture, or environment, that we’ll discuss further in the next chapter. Head Start, a program run by the federal government to improve the life chances of poor children, is based on the idea that, in terms of life success, genetics are less important than a child’s access to things such as nutrition and education. Started in 1965, it bypasses state educational programs, funneling money directly to poor communities for medical and dental care for children, nutritious lunches, and basic social and academic skills. Over the last thirty-eight years, it has tried to improve as many as twenty million American children. But has it been a success?
Alvin F. Poussaint, a black professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School who participated in the first years of the program in Jackson, Mississippi, believes that it has. The fact that kids in Head Start were shown to have greater abilities in vocabulary, math, and sociability than kids not in the program proved it was educating poor children and thus would help them escape poverty, according to Poussaint, and therefore it should be expanded. By contrast, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the white authors of the controversial The Bell Curve, think that Head Start should be abolished, arguing that inherited abilities account for all differences in intelligence and success. Murray even argues that Head Start has made minority children worse off, by fostering their dependence on government aid.
Similarly, in her book The Nature Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do (a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize), psychology researcher Judith Rich Harris argued that Head Start made no difference at all in the lives of children it affected. Why? Because their personalities and intelligence were determined not by their parents or school programs but by their genes and peers.
For those who believe that a just society must promote equality, rather than make it worse, any new biological inequality—such as children of star athletes having a greater chance of enhanced abilities through biotech—is regarded as pernicious. It is one thing to tolerate inequities in family support, early childhood education, and quality of K-12 school systems, but deeper, biological inequality must be nipped in the bud, especially a metaphysical inequality hitherto unknown among humans: one written not in the shifting sands of unequal environments but in the cold stone of genes. Our society may be able to tolerate social-economic inequality, but not tolerate biological inequality.
And perhaps this is why Topside must be so secretive about its mission and goals. As Nietzsche said, democracies fear the Übermensch, the great-souled person, and would try to bring him down, to enslave him. Democracies would try to prevent such beings from being created. So whether Topside’s goal is a cloned superior individual or a cloned superior family line—perhaps the Ledas are just Phase I, where scientists get the kinks out of the process—they must keep their projects hidden from view.
BEWARE THE ÜBERMENSCH?
In short, safe human cloning alarms egalitarians partly because it would allow biological dynasties, which would in turn inevitably worsen existing social-economic inequality. To Cal Morrison, that worsening inequality would mean that Topside won, and that family-directed eugenics had triumphed where state-sanctioned eugenics failed.
To prevent that, egalitarians would make reproductive cloning illegal in all countries. They would join naturalists who fear biotechnology to form a new, powerful coalition against reproductive cloning on the worldwide stage, one that opposes such cloning not because of safety but because of boundary crossings and injustice.
And in truth, egalitarians may be correct to fear a future society in which billions of “normals” propagate naturally, just like their ancestors did for millions of years, the bulk of their children regressing to the mean, while within that society, and increasingly leaving it behind, superior children are advanced each generation, creating a new “genocracy.” The jury is out on whether such a situation would be good or bad for humanity, but it would certainly be bad for those left behind.