The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,40

1927, the rhetoric of genetics and eugenics penetrated social, political, and personal discourses in the United States. In 1927, the state of Indiana passed a revised version of an earlier law to sterilize “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” Other states followed with even more draconian legal measures to sterilize and confine men and women judged to be genetically inferior.

While state-sponsored sterilization programs expanded throughout the nation, a grassroots movement to personalize genetic selection was also gaining popularity. In the 1920s, millions of Americans thronged to agricultural fairs where, alongside tooth-brushing demonstrations, popcorn machines, and hayrides, the public encountered Better Babies Contests, in which children, often as young as one or two years old, were proudly displayed on tables and pedestals, like dogs or cattle, as physicians, psychiatrists, dentists, and nurses in white coats examined their eyes and teeth, prodded their skin, and measured heights, weights, skull sizes, and temperaments to select the healthiest and fittest variants. The “fittest” babies were then paraded through the fairs. Their pictures were featured prominently on posters, newspapers, and magazines—generating passive support for a national eugenics movement. Davenport, the Harvard-trained zoologist famous for establishing the Eugenics Record Office, created a standardized evaluation form to judge the fittest babies. Davenport instructed his judges to examine the parents before judging the children: “You should score 50% for heredity before you begin to examine a baby.” “A prize winner at two may be an epileptic at ten.” These fairs often contained “Mendel booths,” where the principles of genetics and the laws of inheritance were demonstrated using puppets.

In 1927, a film called Are You Fit to Marry?, by Harry Haiselden, another eugenics-obsessed doctor, played to packed audiences across the United States. The revival of an earlier film titled The Black Stork, the plot involved a physician, played by Haiselden himself, who refuses to perform lifesaving operations on disabled infants in an effort to “cleanse” the nation of defective children. The film ends with a woman who has a nightmare of bearing a mentally defective child. She awakens and decides that she and her fiancé must get tested before their marriage to ensure their genetic compatibility (by the late 1920s, premarital genetic-fitness tests, with assessments of family histories of mental retardation, epilepsy, deafness, skeletal diseases, dwarfism, and blindness, were being widely advertised to the American public). Ambitiously, Haiselden meant to market his film as a “date night” movie: it had love, romance, suspense, and humor—with some retail infanticide thrown in on the side.

As the front of the American eugenics movement advanced from imprisonment to sterilization to outright murder, European eugenicists watched the escalation with a mix of eagerness and envy. By 1936, less than a decade after Buck v. Bell, a vastly more virulent form of “genetic cleansing” would engulf that continent like a violent contagion, morphing the language of genes and inheritance into its most potent and macabre form.

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I. Undoubtedly, the historical legacy of slavery was also an important factor driving American eugenics. White eugenicists in America had long convulsed with the fear that African slaves, with their inferior genes, would intermarry with whites and thereby contaminate the gene pool—but laws to prevent interracial marriages, promulgated during the 1860s, had calmed most of these fears. White immigrants, in contrast, were not so easy to identify and separate, thus amplifying the anxieties of ethnic contamination and miscegenation in the 1920s.

PART TWO

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“IN THE SUM OF THE PARTS, THERE ARE ONLY THE PARTS”

Deciphering the Mechanism of Inheritance

(1930–1970)

It was when I said

“Words are not forms of a single word.

In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.

The world must be measured by eye.”

—Wallace Stevens, “On the Road Home”

“Abhed”

Genio y hechura, hasta sepultura. (Natures and features last until the grave.)

—Spanish saying

I am the family face:

Flesh perishes, I live on,

Projecting trait and trace

Through time to times anon,

And leaping from place to place

Over oblivion.

—Thomas Hardy, “Heredity”

The day before our visit with Moni, my father and I took a walk in Calcutta. We started near Sealdah station, where my grandmother had stepped off the train from Barisal in 1946, with five boys and four steel trunks in tow. From the edge of the station, we retraced their path, walking along Prafulla Chandra Road, past the bustling wet market, with open-air stalls of fish and vegetables on the left, and the stagnating pond of water hyacinths on the right, then turned left again, heading toward the city.

The road narrowed sharply and the crowd thickened. On both sides of the street, the