That a red canary will eventually be produced can hardly be doubted. It may be obtained gradually as a result of continued selective breeding. It may appear suddenly as the result of a chance recombination in one individual of the responsible siskin genes.
A. K. GILL, New-coloured Canaries (1955)
In February 1948 Duncker was allowed officially to retire and receive a pension – albeit a modest one. He was sixty-seven. Still highly motivated, he appointed himself honorary curator at the Übersee-Museum with the aim of restoring the neglected bird collections. Among the museum’s treasures were thousands and thousands of dried bird skins accumulated by a previous curator, the ornithologist Gustav Hartlaub, who for sixty years until his death in 1900 had visited exotic locations around the world simply to shoot, collect and stuff birds. Despite the efforts of Duncker and others to protect it, this valuable collection had been damaged during the war and, like much of Germany, was now in a rather sorry state. Duncker threw himself, with typical energy and enthusiasm, into the task of salvaging, cataloguing and preserving these precious specimens.
For several years after the war had finished, conditions in Germany remained fairly desperate. Bremen was a city of ruins and basic commodities continued to be scarce. Duncker was so strapped for cash he couldn’t even afford to pay his subscription to Gefiederte Welt and wrote to the editor excusing himself. In November 1948 he received a very welcome food package from an American ornithologist, Jean Linsdale, who was director of the Hastings Natural History Reservation in California. Deeply touched, Duncker wrote to thank him and described how, on discovering that the parcel contained coffee, he and Elsa had quickly made some – savouring their first cup for several years! He also said how much they had appreciated the chocolate. Twenty years previously, Duncker and Linsdale had exchanged journals: Vögel ferner Länder in return for the Condor. But Duncker hadn’t had a copy of the Condor since 1939 and as for his own journal, ‘it stopped during the Nazi time’, he said, using the derogatory term ‘Nazizeit’ – something that might have been hard to explain had I not seen the account of his Allies interview.1
By 1950 things were starting to improve. In the museum Duncker had almost completed the huge task of restoring and relabelling the collection of 16,000 bird skins. As I discovered when I visited the museum’s basement storerooms Duncker had relabelled every single specimen in his fine, scientist’s handwriting. In the museum’s logbooks Duncker made a master list of all the extant bird specimens and calculated the percentages of each family that had survived the war. In among the cupboards of specimens I found a dusty pair of red siskins, one of Bruno Matern’s red siskin mules, and a large collection of canaries from Duncker’s early variegation work with Reich. There were even examples of the infamous recessive and dominant white canaries that had let Duncker down so badly in his red canary quest.
Duncker now retrieved the bird specimens that he had previously donated to the school museum. This may have been because after being dismissed he didn’t feel that the school deserved them, or perhaps because there was no one there who wanted them. To ensure their safety he took them to the Übersee-Museum. Many of these species, including the red siskin, have since become extremely rare in the wild, making them important additions to the museum’s collections.
Duncker’s success in restoring the bird collection to something close to its former glory was widely appreciated, both by Helmuth Wagner, the museum’s new director, and ornithologists elsewhere, including Erwin Stresemann, still in Berlin but now on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. Duncker’s efforts were rewarded in 1951 when the Übersee-Museum celebrated his seventieth birthday by making him a member of honour.2 This might have been a double celebration, for by this date the red canary was as good as established – thanks to Gill, Bennett and dozens of others – but as he made clear in a lecture he gave around this time, Duncker did not see it like this at all. His speech was, naturally, on inheritance, and he used the example of his red canaries to show how certain traits were inherited: ‘When you cross a canary with a red siskin you get offspring which are “cressrote” in colour, and their offspring in turn were also red.’ He continued, ‘It was never possible to achieve the dark red of the red siskin – the best we could achieve was “cressrote Number 17” on the Ostwald colour chart. . . . The English breeders’, he said, ‘produced birds of identical colour, but’ – and this was the key for Duncker – ‘only by giving them cayenne pepper. Their red colour was not inherited.’ Obsessed with genes to the last. As far as he was concerned, colour-feeding was cheating – his aim had been an honest one: to breed a race of red canaries.3
During the early 1950s some of the other researchers at the museum noted Duncker’s extraordinary dependence on the director’s approval and how, if Wagner failed to call in on him during his daily rounds – which started at 7.30 a.m. – Duncker became upset. Duncker’s dependency may have been due to the need to feel wanted, but it may also have been because many of the younger researchers at the museum were desperately trying to distance themselves from their country’s earlier abuse of biology. One of these, Gerd von Wahlert – later professor – had an office on the same corridor as Duncker and in 1954 was asked by Wagner to write about the educational role of the natural history museum. In doing so he took the opportunity to condemn the Third Reich’s horrifying perversion of biology. Duncker’s Nazi links were well known, but no one ever discussed this with him. As von Wahlert later told me, others in the museum who had been Nazis both before and during the war had recanted and were ‘pardoned’, but because Duncker never did he was never formally forgiven.4 This didn’t prevent Hans and Elsa Duncker inviting von Wahlert and his wife for ‘a spoon of soup’ at their old-fashioned apartment in Mathildenstrasse, which in the typical Bremer’s understated way turned out to be a full-blown, formal three-course lunch. When von Wahlert gently teased Duncker about his smoking habit, Duncker replied proudly that there had never been a day since his confirmation that he had been without a cigar. As von Wahlert cast his mind back almost fifty years to recall his lunch with Hans and Elsa Duncker, he suddenly remembered that there were budgerigars in their living room.
Duncker must eventually have paid his subscription to Gefiederte Welt, for in 1950 the editor, Joachim Steinbacher, wrote requesting his help to settle a red canary argument. The issue was one of terminology: what should the increasing number of red and other colour varieties be called? Scientists avoid confusion in wild birds and other animals by using internationally standard scientific names, but no such system exists for the varieties of domestic animals produced by artificial selection. The potential for confusion is therefore considerable, as is the potential for individuals to gain status if their particular terminology is adopted. It was precisely this type of conflict that Steinbacher was seeking to resolve. The battle was between Julius Henniger, Duncker’s most avid follower, and Karl Hotter, who was jostling with him for the position of top red canary man in eastern Germany. Exactly what one called a colour canary was not a trivial issue, for by the 1950s the number of colour mutations was rapidly increasing. Anthony Gill listed more than ten varieties with names that are dreadfully confusing to the uninitiated, including ‘orange greens’, ‘red orange greens’ and ‘dilute red orange greens’. The Germans had their own names, mostly stemming from Ostwald’s colour scheme adopted during the Nazizeit when foreign terms, like ‘orange’, were illegal. The argument Duncker was asked to arbitrate was whether the German colour canary breeders should adopt Henniger’s or Hotter’s system. If a particular breed of canary should be called Blasskressrot (Henniger’s pale-nasturtium-red) or Hellkress (Hotter’s bright nasturtium) now seems a minor issue, but for Henniger and Hotter this was a battle for enduring status, for whoever’s system was adopted would gain a certain immortality.
One step ahead of Hotter, Henniger had already written to Duncker, making a case for why his terminology should have precedence and, for good measure, denigrating Hotter for having been a Nazi. We don’t know what Duncker told Steinbacher, but it seems he must have sided with Hotter, for when Henniger privately published his book on colour canaries ten years later he complained bitterly that other fanciers had failed to adopt his system of names.5
Even in retirement Duncker carried on giving public lectures. Now they were on the biology of birds, chromosomes and inheritance rather than eugenics. Judging from reports in the local newspapers these performances were a tremendous success6 – Duncker was still an engaging and effective speaker – and the topics he chose were of great general interest.
There are few extant remnants of Duncker’s personal life, but some lie in the museum’s archive. ‘Archive’ sounds rather grand, and smacks of order and organisation, but in reality it comprises a broken box file of unsorted papers and the view it provides of Duncker is no more than the sort of glimpse we get through the window of a house as we pass by on a bus. Perhaps the single most important artefact is the yellowing typescript of a lecture on human psychology and its inheritance that Duncker gave in 1950 in which he drew on his own family as an example. The idea Duncker introduced in this lecture was that people fall into one of two types; outgoing individuals who work for ‘life’ – whom Duncker calls Lebenwerkmenschen – and ‘day workers’, those who are more inward-looking and concerned with day-to-day matters of domestic life – Tageswerkmenschen. His implicit assumption was that these two personality types were genetically determined like the colour of ordinary canaries; one dominant, the other recessive. His father, a judge, a local politician and founder of a conservative newspaper company in which the workers had a share in the profits, was a life person. His mother, on the other hand, was a day person, keeping house and helping her husband. Their offspring, as expected, were a mixture of the two types. His younger brother inherited his mother’s personality and was a ‘day person’ and became a pastor in a small village. His elder brother was a mixture of the two types, while Duncker himself was like his father – a dominant life person. To his dying day Duncker’s view of the world was one of uncompromising genetic determinism.
Throughout his seventies Duncker visited the museum almost every day. Anthony Gill’s book New-coloured Canaries was published in 1955 and it seems likely that Gill sent Duncker a copy. Duncker would have been pleased with the prominent role accorded him in the creation of Gill’s red factor canaries, but disappointed that Gill was satisfied with birds that relied on colour-feeding. Moreover, because Gill had much closer links with American canary breeders, and because he recognised the essential input carotenoids had had in creating the red canary, Gill dedicated his book to Bennett rather than Duncker. Two years later, at the age of eighty-three, Gill was dead. In the same year Helmuth Wagner wrote a short account of Duncker’s life for the Bremen Natural History Society journal, applauding his early scientific work on heredity and his recent restoration work at the museum, but also alluding to his eugenic publications – the cue, I assume, for Walter’s later exposé.
In 1960, the year the Beatles first performed in Hamburg, Duncker’s wife Elsa died. Even after she had gone, Duncker – now nearly eighty – continued to visit the museum. Then, in September 1961, almost a year to the day after his wife’s death, he became ill. Unable to care for himself, he was taken to live with one of his daughters at Saarbrücken on the French border and it was there, on 22 December 1961, that Duncker died.
In England the red canary society started by Anthony Gill thirty years previously soared from strength to strength and his book continued to serve as a beacon for those still striving for an even redder canary. For many fanciers the fire of enthusiasm still burnt brightly, if somewhat less vigorously, for the birds seemed to be as red as they were ever going to get despite the combined efforts of thousands of fanciers. They were reluctant to admit it, but the red factor canaries they had were still not the crimson colour they all dreamed of and the more sceptical fanciers considered even the very best birds to be no more than deep orange.
In the years just before he died, Gill had been frustrated by the fact that so few members had remained true to the original crimson objective. Many of them, he grumbled, satisfied with orange or pastel birds, had branched off on their own down less colourful but more hopeful avenues.7 Nonetheless, they all continued to experiment with dietary supplements in the hope of enhancing their birds’ colour, for competition on the show bench remained sharp. Contestants had to abide by the club’s rules, however, which ever since 1947 had decreed that they could feed their birds anything in its natural state that could be grown in the garden. This ruling tested the ingenuity and resolve of bird keepers, many of whom were not gardeners and some were periodically panicked by the discovery of a fellow fancier cultivating something exotic on his allotment. High in carotene, Russian comfrey had a brief period of popularity during the 1960s with some breeders swearing by its colour-enhancing effect. But in reality nothing had much influence. Certainly red pepper, which could turn a yellow canary orange, added little extra colour to a genetically orange bird. The only trick that seemed to have an effect was to avoid giving birds anything containing yellow carotenoids during their moult, for it was firmly believed that this reduced the intensity of any red colour. Accordingly, fanciers avoided feeding their moulting birds on canary seed and dandelion leaves (both rich in yellow carotenoids) and instead maintained them on a deadly dull diet of niger seed and oatmeal – free of any yellow carotenoids whatsoever.8
After years of deep-orange stagnation the red canary took a sudden and brilliant leap forward in 1964. In that year, to everyone’s amazement, the national club secretary, Jack Swift, and his two best mates, exhibited some startlingly red birds whose plumage bordered on the elusive crimson they all fantasised about.9 There were gasps of amazement at these haemoglobin-red birds and intense speculation about what they must have been fed to produce such remarkable plumage. Flushed with success, Swift and his team toured the length and breadth of the country collecting prizes and carrying away silver cups wherever they went. It was like rerunning the Edward Bemrose video – except now the future was even brighter. Frustrated losers huddled in corners or behind closed doors, cogitating and gossiping about Swift’s meteoric rise to fame. They pestered him relentlessly for his secret, but as long as he continued to fill the glass-fronted cabinets in his living room with trophies Swift, like Edward Bemrose before him, kept quiet. Swift’s extraordinary success was not without its glitches, however, and at a few shows experienced judges like George Lynch became suspicious and ruled Swift’s birds out of order, refusing to consider them on the grounds that they must have been fed on something very obviously not grown in the garden. Disqualified and deprived of the prizes he felt he deserved, Swift was bitter in his recriminations – he was the club secretary for God’s sake! But many admired Lynch’s firm stand, and at shows where Swift’s brilliant birds won and deprived others of what they felt was their due the losers were vitriolic in their condemnation. The furore wasn’t confined to the schoolrooms and village halls where these canary competitions took place, nor to the smoke-filled pubs where exhibitors went afterwards to celebrate or commiserate. It soon became public, and the pages of Cage and Aviary Birds crackled with controversy as Swift and his supporters came under increasing criticism.
At the end of the 1964 show season, Jack Swift, who was not a young man and somewhat overweight, was taken ill and rushed to hospital. He remained there for weeks getting weaker and weaker, his condition undiagnosed. Unlikely to recover and unable to continue his duties as secretary, the club reluctantly decided that they had no choice but to replace him. When a new secretary was found, Swift’s wife dutifully handed over all the club’s files and paperwork, unaware that in doing so she was putting the final nail into her husband’s coffin. A week later as Bill Newland, the new secretary, sorted through the files he was thunderstruck to see what his predecessor had been up to. There in front of him in black and white was Jack’s secret – a receipt for a new carotene product with the trade name of Carophyll.
Carophyll had been created by the German pharmaceutical giant Roche,10 and Swift had got to hear about it in 1963 at the corn merchant’s where he was employed. Many of his customers were poultry men and one of them told him about a new food additive for chickens that coloured their egg yolks deep orange. Swift persuaded the man to sell him a small amount – it wasn’t cheap – and he took it home to feed to his orange birds. The scruffy envelope that had been surreptitiously passed to him at work made him feel like a criminal, but when he looked inside and saw the smattering of coarse maroon dust, he wondered which of them was the crook. He was told that the chicken men simply mixed the dust with the birds’ mash, so this is what Swift did, although he had no idea how much to use. Before presenting his orange birds with their new diet, Swift caught them and, using his forefinger and thumb, pulled a few breast feathers from each one. Swift felt more than ever like a criminal, but like willing accomplices, the birds didn’t even flinch – the feathers almost fell out of their own accord. It was like planting magic beans, and Swift waited impatiently for the patch of replacement plumage to grow. It took several weeks, but as the new feathers pushed out of their protective sheaths, Swift could hardly believe his eyes – they were as close to a red siskin’s in colour as he had ever seen. Carophyll, like Viagra, had revitalised the canary breeders’ flaccid libido and engorged their extended phenotypes with an intensity of colour never seen before. The effect was so startling that Swift didn’t dare show his wife. Instead, he confided in his two closest friends and between them they agreed to keep their seductive miracle a secret. Perched precariously on the threshold of success, they pledged to keep the vivid birds they subsequently produced under wraps until the next show season. Carophyll would make them famous.
Carophyll is the trade name of a carotenoid with a cumbersome if not wholly unutterable name of ‘canthaxanthin’ (pronounced can-tha-zan-thin) and was developed specifically to put the colour back into the eggs of battery chickens – it still is. The same substance was also sold in tablet form in the United States as a tanning agent, but was withdrawn after someone died as a result – albeit in a blaze of colour.11 Orange feathers on a bird look beautiful but bright-orange skin – or to be accurate, the fat beneath the skin – on a human looks positively alien. Nonetheless, dissolved in water (it looks like blood) or mixed in with their food during the birds’ moult, Carophyll transformed birds from orange to red – providing, of course, they carried the crucial red genes.
Newland lost no time in revealing the secret of Swift’s seedy success to the club’s senior members. They were incandescent. Not least because it explained why earlier in the year, in what was now clearly an abuse of his privileged position, Swift had proposed (unsuccessfully, as it happened) that fanciers should be allowed to feed anything to their birds. Wallace Dean – a top canary judge – was infuriated by Swift’s behaviour because, having bought some of his red birds for a hefty sum, he then watched them moult into ordinary orange canaries.
That Swift doctored his birds was hardly novel. Newland knew dozens of fanciers who had tried it. The motivation to win, whether on the canary show bench, at the canine equivalent, Crufts, or at the Olympics, is so strong that the temptation to cheat is sometimes irresistible. Just as athletes take the red blood cell booster Epogen (EPO) to enhance their performance, so canary breeders pumped their birds full of blood-red pigments to increase their chances of one winning. In every branch of the bird fancy cheating was rife. It was so bad in the poultry world that there was even a book describing the devious tricks some exhibitors got up to.12 Faking poultry was easier than faking canaries or mules, but it still happened and bird keepers told me how (as young men new to the fancy) they had been duped by linnets smeared with lipstick or by white canaries washed in detergent to increase the reflectance of their feathers.
Surprisingly, not all canary fanciers were outraged by Swift’s use of Carophyll. Some saw it as a much-needed advance because it was now possible to produce truly red birds. Others felt it was a betrayal of everything they had worked for over the past forty years. After much debate the club officials finally agreed that since it was impossible to prove whether a bird had been fed on Carophyll they had no choice but to allow its use. In their turn, the members now had no option but to use it if they wanted to remain competitive. This was red raw sexual selection, comparable to a situation in the wild where a new super-attractive male mutant arises, driving females to mate with it to the exclusion of all others.
The saga had gone full circle for canthaxanthin was a dye and feeding it to canaries was nothing less than dying them from within – no different from feeding red pepper to yellow canaries, except that Carophyll in combination with the right genes was infinitely more powerful. Some breeders justified its use by saying it simply brought to the surface a bird’s natural attributes, but in reality Carophyll is a potent and vigorous dye, which both enhances and exaggerates a bird’s natural colours. But canthaxanthin was hardly something canaries would encounter naturally, for in nature it occurs only in the exoskeletons of saltwater shrimps. Canthaxanthin allows flamingos to retain a rosy hue in the wild because shrimps are what they eat, but it is certainly not what keeps red siskins, house finches or any of the other red finches red in the wild. At least, not directly. What seems to happen among small red birds is that they acquire natural carotenoids – possibly from berries or particular seeds, no one really knows for sure – which are transformed in their bodies into canthaxanthin, which is then pumped into the growing feathers. Feeding birds neat canthaxanthin, as Swift did, and as all red canary enthusiasts have done ever since, bypasses all the normal metabolic pathways and allows huge amounts of red pigment to be dumped directly in the birds’ plumage. One way to think about this is to imagine the bird as a Christmas tree. If it has red genes in its make-up, the tree has light sockets in which coloured bulbs can be placed. If you put red bulbs in the sockets – equivalent to feeding the bird Carophyll – the tree lights up red. Without red bulbs there is nothing you can do to turn the tree red. And if you don’t have the sockets in the first place it doesn’t matter how many red bulbs you’ve got, the tree still won’t light up red. It probably works in exactly the same way for chicken egg yolks and the flesh of farmed salmon, which without a diet of shrimps or commercial canthaxanthin would be an unappetising grey rather than a succulent pink colour.
Carophyll does more than act merely as a dye. If this were all there was to it then all red birds fed on Carophyll would end up the same shade of red, regardless of their species. But they don’t. You can feed different species the same amount of Carophyll and watch one turn deep scarlet and the other pink. You can see the same thing in a single species – the redpoll, as its name implies, has a red cap, but its breast is pink and no amount of Carophyll will turn its breast red. This is because there is an interaction even here between the environmental input of carotenes and the bird’s genes.13
The eventual success of Duncker, Gill, Bennett and their followers in producing a red canary mirrors the seemingly endless debate over nature versus nurture. The tragedy of Hans Duncker is that as early as 1922 he recognised the subtle but dynamic interplay between genes and environment in Reich’s nightingale-canaries, but failed to apply the same kind of enlightened thinking to anything else. Duncker’s explanation for how Reich’s canaries acquired their exotic song was an utterly brilliant bit of deduction, but so far in advance of anyone else’s thinking that it disappeared without trace, falling unnoticed between the cracks. Perhaps if his paper had been noticed and he had received the appropriate credit, things might have been different. But many years were to pass before the broader implications of this kind of research were recognised. Writing in 1984 Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of ornithology and evolution, summarised the study of song acquisition in birds as follows: ‘I do not think that I am exaggerating when I say that research in this area has made a greater contribution towards the invalidation of the rigid polarity of Galton’s nature or nurture principle than almost any other research.’14 If only Duncker had realised it, the acquisition of redness in a bird’s plumage provided an equally compelling illustration of how inappropriate it was to separate nature from nurture.
But he failed or refused to recognise it. Duncker knew, of course, that colour could have an environmental component because he was well aware of the effect of red peppers on feathers. But creating a red canary by breeding rather than feeding was a matter of personal pride, coupled with an unshakeable belief in the inheritance of colour.
The world of the all-powerful gene was Duncker’s world. In a practical sense it was one that worked well for understanding relatively simple traits, like those so carefully chosen by Mendel in his peas, and by luck, the colour of ordinary canaries and budgerigars. Away from the bird rooms and aviaries this narrow type of gene thinking reinforced an already prevalent belief that what ‘is’ should ‘be’. It also reinforced the notion that differences between human races, classes and the sexes arise from inherited, inborn distinctions. As a consequence, theories based exclusively on genetics failed as miserably with people as they had with the red canary. Moreover, because the biologists’ deterministic theories had lent themselves so readily to political abuse, genetics became a dirty word and for a long time after 1945 biological explanations of human nature were taboo.
The taboo lasted thirty years (even longer in Germany) and was eventually challenged by what many saw as a new form of biological determinism – the rise of ‘sociobiology in the mid-1970s. Tragically, this name, given innocently enough, was horribly close to the Nazis’ ‘Sozialbiologie’ and triggered a wave of widespread revolt. The sociobiologists’ main theme was that genes do influence behaviour, but not to the exclusion of all other influences. In the controversy that subsequently raged within academic and non-academic circles, views became polarised and it was easy to think that the sociobiologists saw only genes – a view that Dawkins seemed to confirm in The Selfish Gene. This was wrong, however, as Dawkins was at pains to point out, and on being asked why sociobiology was so often linked with right-wing views Dawkins answered, ‘Because the opponents of sociobiology are too stupid to understand the distinction between what one says about the way the world is, scientifically, and the way it ought to be politically.’ This was the root of the problem; concern over the true nature of human nature – free will versus determinism.15 The critics of sociobiology were terrified that providing biological or genetic explanations for behaviour – and human behaviour in particular including war, race and genocide – exonerated those who had committed and benefited from monstrous wartime crimes. The critics of sociobiology were preoccupied with guilt, a legacy of World War II. What they wanted to believe in was free will, free of any genetic influence. Total freedom meant individual responsibility, without which human behaviour, they said, could all too easily be ‘explained away’, leaving no one morally responsible for his or her actions.
Critics also assumed that science with socially undesirable implications, that is morally or politically bad science, must also be scientifically bad. Duncker’s science was, for the most part, ‘good’ in that it was logical and clear-thinking, and his failure to create a red canary can be attributed to two things. First, replacing a yellow canary’s genes with those from a red siskin proved far more difficult than he anticipated – especially with the primitive technology and limited genetic knowledge then available. Second, Duncker was so obsessed by genetic effects he never entertained the possibility that red genes even in their rightful owner might require something from the environment (like carotenoids) to make them work.
By the 1990s it was clear that the critics’ fear of a new biologically deterministic regime was unfounded. The sociobiologists or behavioural ecologists had won the debate, in part because, with the advent of the human genome project and its increased ability to combat disease, ‘genetics’ had become a term of promise rather than threat. The genetic pendulum had swung back.16
Some people find the idea of being able to partition traits like song or colour in canaries or intelligence in humans into a nature and a nurture component reassuring. But this misses the point. Despite its worthy pedigree, the phrase ‘nature versus nurture’ which Francis Galton borrowed from Shakespeare’s Tempest and which Shakespeare borrowed from an earlier writer is utterly outdated. There is no nature-nurture battle. In his book Eugenics (2002) David Galton says: ‘The nature-nurture antithesis is well and truly dead. It should be consigned to the waste bin together with other moribund ideas’. As the red canary story shows, most traits cannot be divided unequivically into an either-or situation. Instead, colour, like so many traits in humans and non-humans alike, arises from the subtle interaction between genes and the environment. The case is most elegantly made by Matt Ridley and encapsulated in the title of his book Nature via Nurture.
The idea of nature versus nurture is dead, but what is not dead is eugenics. Our enormous strides in understanding the genome and in developing reproductive technologies (including in vitro fertilisation and more recently the cloning of Dolly the sheep) means that there are many more eugenic decisions we have to face in future. It has been suggested that these two topics together should be named repro-genetics, but as David Galton has pointed out, avoiding the term eugenics obscures the historical perspective: ‘The history of the subject is so important because it shows us in no uncertain light the many horrendous pits that we should try never to fall into again. These have been mainly dug by our politicians and regulators.’ His view is that if managed properly eugenic technology holds great promise for improving the quality of life.