The Ramazzini Institute
for Occupational and Environmental Health Research   

Inside

Who Are We?

     “No one then had any compelling reason to take my hypothesis seriously, but by November 1952 I liked it well enough to print DNA ® RNA ® protein on a small piece of paper that I taped on the wall above my writing table in my rooms at Clare College. From the day of our first meeting, Francis Crick and I thought it highly likely that the genetic information of DNA is conveyed by the sequence of its four bases. But we knew it was premature to promote this idea before the structure of DNA was known. However, the moment we first saw how to build a double helix out of the four base pairs, it was clear that the essential uniqueness of a gene must reside in its respective sequence of four bases.”
        So wrote James D. Watson in his book, A Passion for DNA: Genes, Genomes, and Society, published last year.[1] In this work, told with refreshing honesty, is the human story of how Watson and Francis Crick won a Nobel Prize for what may be the most important advance in the life sciences since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, and the key to understanding the charge of “eugenics” that has greeted Watson in Germany .
     In the past year, the German government has more than doubled its annual funding of genome research to nearly a half billion dollars, supporting a powerful new network of basic research organizations tied to the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare providers. At the same time, as in much of the rest of the industrialized world, Germany is grappling with how to apply what we now know, and knowledge still to unfold, taking careful steps on the ethical and social issues of human cloning, sources of stem cells, gene therapy and genetic engineering. The government has chartered a National Ethics Council of leading natural scientists, physicians, theologians, philosophers, social scientists, lawyers, ecologists and economists. The twenty six person panel is chaired by Professor Spiros Simitis of Johann-Wolgang Goethe University, Frankfurt, with Professors Regine Kollek of Hamburg University and Eckhard Nagel of  the Transplantation Center in the Augsburg Clinic as co-chairs. The distinguished body has had no time for leisurely debate. Abuse of the new technologies is well underway.
    One company in Frankfurt is already offering an $800 “genetic risk assessment” for 800 diseases. About 25 tests for genetic disease are available for home use.   As in the United States, in Germany receipt of test results may require disclosure of the information to insurance companies and employers. Consumer and labor groups in both countries are concerned about protection from invasions of privacy and involuntary genetic testing for disease susceptibility. The commercialization of the tests has raised additional concerns. Dr. J.-D. Hoppe, president of the German Medical Association, says the tests, offered on the internet, are of dubious quality and the user receives no help in interpreting the test results, or in dealing with the clinical and personal implications.[2]
    How should those tested be helped? How do we deal, for example, with the clinical and personal implications if a test shows that a fetus has a severe genetic disease? Should it be aborted?  Watson, in a speech given in Germany on September 26, last year, said that perhaps the time had come when armed with information not possible before recent advances in genetics, parents of a fetus known to have an untreatable, severe genetic disease might end the pregnancy. The speech is on page 173 of A Passion for DNA.
    “Its origin was a lecture I gave in Milan on December 7, 1994,” writes Dr. Watson. “Its appearance in Italy caused no controversy.”[3] In Germany, however, Dr. Hoppe reacted with the severest criticism. He accused Watson of espousing “Nazi logic.”[4]
    Was it “Nazi logic,” or a difference in how to apply technology consistent with arguably valid religious or ethical beliefs that clash with other arguably valid beliefs?
    Watson makes no bones about what he believes. How we prevent or not prevent “the fundamental tragedies that come from genetic disease” is governed by a man-made “social contract”, not a divine mandate, that controls the grounds for any action taken, and identifies the agents who make the decision. He believes the contract ought to require an informed, voluntary choice made by parents, not a government.  In contrast, the Nazis adopted an eugenic code that they used to justify subjugation and murder of whole groups of people, so-called races they didn’t like and the mentally ill or impaired [many of whom had already been sterilized.] The code was enforced ruthlessly by a totalitarian government; not by the freely consenting, informed decision of a mother and father to prevent the birth of inevitable lives of pain. The charge of “Nazi logic” is logically unfair.
    Henning Ritter, a writer for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, agrees that Watson certainly does not support Nazi eugenics. He does say that Watson’s views “expressly challenge the ethical consensus of civilized society.”[5] Whether such a consensus exists in part depends upon what Ritter means by “civilized”, if indeed we have reached that point in human evolution [whatever set of values that implies.] Less nebulous is his assertion that “the decision to end the life of a genetically damaged fetus will never be a private one. Without the help of doctors and lawyers, it is not possible.” To this fact, we must add that in our society there is no hospital, clinic, medical education or research facility that is not tied to some extent to a record keeping government. Employers and insurers typically demand a breach of privacy, frequently with success. Thus the decision is never absolutely private. To the contrary, it involves in one form or another a decision by some part or the whole of a community on the allocation of community resources.
     Is it moral for even the most democratic government of a community to decide to abort or not to abort a human fetus? That has been the paramount question at the heart of the reproductive rights debate. It has been answered in part by the imposition of an often vague range of limitations, from no restrictions whatsoever to just those endangering the mothers’ life to absolutely no abortion under any circumstance even of embryos too defective to live beyond the womb. The question shares with most bioethical issues fundamental assumptions about life itself, at what stage in development a dividing egg can be called a human being, and the possibility of conflicting rights of the unborn and the born.
    The question is complicated by the economic implications of genetic policy that force a political compromise: export the visible problem by the use of imported embryonic tissue harvested in less visible markets in other countries.
    Under the best of social conditions, determining the severity of a disease and the inevitability of a prognosis may be a subjective judgment raising additional questions of personal tolerance and professional certainty that are not easily answered. Where do you draw the line between allowable and unallowable genetic severity? How do we make a decision of life and death faced with a spectrum of often conflicting scientific information and bewildering expert opinions?  Indeed, whom can the average family trust for help?
    The debate in Germany is not just another center for the heated debate in our global society on a range of public policy choices, from cloning and the use of aborted tissue for stem cell research to the resurrection of eugenics as a socially-accepted form of fighting disease. Watson finds the history of his generation of genetic scientists in Germany haunting, Much of that history he learned from reading the work of a trusted colleague, the Benno Mueller-Hill, Professor of Genetics at Cologne. A younger generation of German scientists and physicians seem no less haunted, albeit they did not themselves create the abuses of the past. They appear determined not only not to forget the past, but to prevent its repetition.  
    Watson makes clear his understanding of the debate, and the necessity to add more than bible thumping to the dialogue. Watson knows that changes in the structure of law and society, in the substance and quantity of what we need to know, and in empowering real choice are necessary if his plea for the rational use of biotechnology is ever to prevail. Even after these changes, the community consensus may support Dr. Hoppe and not Dr. Watson, or perhaps neither. Nevertheless, Watson made an early decision to be sure that such a debate takes place. Indeed, ensuring public debate is part of the prescient personal history recounted in A Passion for DNA.
     More than thirty years ago, James D. Watson wrote an essay on human cloning for The Atlantic Monthly.[6] He correctly predicted where the technique could develop first: England. He correctly predicted  “a frenetic rush to do experimental manipulation with human eggs once they have become a readily available commodity” in the vaccum left by a legal and legislative mess. He chastised his colleagues in biology for failing to “begin a dialogue which would educate the world’s citizens and offer suggestions which our legislative bodies might consider….” “This is a matter,” he said, “far too important to be left solely in the hands of the scientific and medical communities. … if we do not think about it now, the possibility of our having a free choice will one day suddenly be gone.” As recent events demonstrate, we may be on the threshold of losing that choice.     
    In 1991, soon after the international program to unravel the double helix of DNA began, Watson, then director of the nation’s human genome research program, was in a better position to be heard. He told a House Government Operations subcommittee that genetic information should be absolutely private. Listening to that testimony, this writer sensed a forthright scientist trying to be sure that the technology of which he is a senior author is used, but not abused. His message was clear: the unfettered use of a huge computer-assisted government data bank of personal genetic information on millions of people is ethically repulsive.  
    Watson asked that three percent of the total budget of the genome project be reserved for ethical, legal and social research. Many in the Congress, such as David Obey of Wisconsin, then as now a ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, understood what he was saying and made that request a law, setting a precedent for the introduction of new technology. Watson had well-founded grounds for concern. He was and is the Director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which was the primary technical resource of the American Eugenics movement.
    An earlier director of the laboratory used money donated by the widow of industrialist E.H. Harriman to support “experts” such as Harry P. Laughlin. In Congressional testimony Laughlin stated as scientific fact that immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were genetically “marked by unacceptable amounts of insanity, mental deficiency, and criminality.”[7] The American and German Eugenics movements were partners. Laughlin received an honorary degree from Heidelberg University for his promotion of “racial hygiene,” beliefs popularly believed to have been unique to the” far right”, the “rassenhygiene” of the Nazis in the 1930s. Their history in both countries is much longer and politically pervasive. Even earlier many in the eugenics movement had similar ideas, especially about workers. Albert Wiggam, one of their propagandists, attributed America’s labor troubles in that era, riots and bombings, to “undesirable citizens descended from undesirable blood overseas.” This was consistent with still earlier social views that shaped the American government’s labor, health, natural resource and immigration policies.
    F.J. Warne, a Bureau of Mines official writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science on The Effect of Unionism Upon the Mine Worker, in 1903, bemoaned the role of unions, who were upsetting a system in which the government and the mine owners collaborated in encouraging the migration and employment of unmarried and childless miners from Europe, especially Slavs, whose lives could be put at a higher risk because, to quote his paper, their lives were “least valuable.”[8] They could be sacrificed in an unnatural selection. Only the mine owners need survive. Not only workers were at risk. In that era, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller’s perversion of Darwinism to justify concentrating industry in the hands of the few, a very socially select few, as simply the “survival of the fittest”, had long been transposed to public policy.
     These values persist today in the United States, as expressed in the ideology of “acceptable risk” and its mechanism, “cost-benefit analysis”, that still dominate American policy for controlling the work and community environments, despite explicit prohibitions in laws to regulate pesticides, polluted air and contamination of the work environment, and notwithstanding bans by the Supreme Court of the United States against cannibalism in setting environmental health standards. [N.B., this writer’s bias!]
    The history of the Eugenics movement is no less haunting on the far left of the political spectrum. “Eugenics” was a term invented by a cousin of Charles Darwin, the statistician Francis Galton, whose career as a publicist for his views enabled him to endow what is now the Galton Laboratory of University College London. The chair was first occupied by his protégé, socialist Karl Pearson, who helped start still another tradition: the amalgamation of far left wing politics and eugenics. J.B.S. Haldane, a leading geneticist from the political far left in the British Eugenics movement, was one. He expressed a “scientific” view that since society was already making the attempt to exclude so-called “accident prone workers” from certain trades, he wrote in 1938, the principle could perhaps be carried a great deal further. It was. In the ‘workers paradise,’ the USSR, Galton’s ideas had preceded him, with a blueprint for implementation straight from America: the sterilization laws of a number of states.
    Sterilization, however, is a crude procedure. It was replaced by another method, much closer to those proposed today for the American workplace: developing biomarkers for unwanted behavioral and other inherited characteristics. Using artificial insemination to remove the offending genes that bear them from worker castes in the Soviet Union was the agenda of the Institute of Medical Genetics in Moscow, whose Godfather was H.J. Muller, then a University of Texas professor of genetics who won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that x-rays cause genetic mutations. His was an improvement over earlier programs to “purify” workers through sterilization, marriage restrictions, and immigration control. He argued that in a socialist society based upon control of production, one could be confident in the control of the most important means of production, “reproduction.” His student, supported by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, S.G. Levit, founded and directed the Institute in 1934.
    Watson in his book tells part of this saga in the annals of science. The project came to an end when Muller lost the political struggle, and as Watson relates, almost his life over Lysenkoism, which Watson correctly calls ‘shamanism” [among other appropriate epithets.] Levit was later executed. But there is still more. [9]
    Muller was later repentant, as was Haldane. But their peers in American and Great Britain, no differently than their German colleagues, failed to come to terms with the lessons of inserting technology in societies governed by the personal values of a self-selected political elite. The insertion of even well-intended ideas, good or bad from a scientific perspective and good or bad from a moral perspective, might just cause public  uproar in a relatively open society when they fail. In the closed societies of Germany and Russia at that time, the effect was a bloody disaster. Haldane and Muller demonstrated that having high skills as scientists, extraordinary intelligence, and good intentions, does not necessarily enable good moral and social choices.  
    What many in the labor movement see as a “blame the victim” syndrome, like Haldane’s “principle” of the genetically-determined “accident prone worker” who can be excluded from work, cloaked in the language of science, can indeed be carried a great deal further, as it was in Sovietized post war East Germany.
     In the Erz Gebirge, Schneeberg lung disease, cancer of the lung associated with ionizing radiation among the uranium miners, Sir Richard Doll reported in 1975, “was commonly ascribed to a secondary effect of silicosis in an inbred population predisposed by hereditary susceptibility.”[10] The ascription is not necessarily Professor Doll’s opinion, but simply his review and summary of the published literature. This ‘science’, we have reported elsewhere, helped to rationalize inaction in the Soviet controlled mines. The East German government recorded 15,000 cases of silicosis and 6800 cases of cancer among the miners during the “cold” war.[11]
     Dr. H.-J. Woitowitz, Director of the Institute for Occupational and Social Medicine at the Justus Liebig University of Giessen, ascribes the lung cancers not only to ionizing radiation, especially radon daughters, but also the synergistic effect of silica. The carcinogenic properties of respirable silica dust have been well documented by the International Agency for Research in Cancer, the German Maximum Allowable Concentrations Committee and others.
     In the “survival of the fittest”, not a concept of his own with which Darwin was particularly comfortable, the “ fittest” is usually taken to mean the most reproductively successful, none of whom, Darwin’s champion T.H. Huxley reminds us, may be of the highest order of Man. If ‘the highest order‘ means the highest moral order, arguably some little icons of genetic science deserve to tumble from the shelf where they are kept in academia. Among Galton’s contemporaries in England there were those in a countervailing tradition who agreed. Leonard T. Hobhouse, Professor of Sociology in the University of London, certainly no anti-Darwinian, he successfully integrated Darwinian thinking into political theory, was a vociferous critic of Galton and his followers. His most powerful argument was a quote from geneticist William Bateson: “Genetic science ...gives no clear sanction to these proposals ...Society has never shown itself averse to adopt measures of the most stringent and even brutal kind for the control of those whom it regards as its enemies.”[12] Nothing has changed the import of this indictment since it was written in 1909. 
    In Haldane’s generation, Aldous Huxley used his novel Brave New World to warn of another kind of brutality in state projects on the scale of the Manhattan Project, Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon updated, to condition embryos to become future miners, chemical workers, acetate silk spinners and steelworkers who could tolerate heat, lead, caustic soda, tar and chlorine. [13] It was not a too far-fetched extrapolation from either Lysenkoism or Nazi ‘science’. But Aldous did not speak for his brother.
    Long since removed from the humble roots of his grandfather, who took pride in his work as an educator of working people in London, Sir Julian Huxley [the first Director General of UNESCO] supported a caste system to insure “ a cheap supply of unskilled and semi-skilled workers” for war and industry, but one which should not be allowed to reproduce too quickly, so as not to outpace “the upper economic classes” who “are not reproducing fast enough, “ and who had demonstrated their superiority because, after all, they were just like him. As for managing the gene-environment interface, well there is always the lesson learned from managing “African cattle. “[14]
    How would Darwin have reacted to this sad history? Darwin was concerned with the health of the human breeding population, but was also uncomfortable with the remedies of the eugenicists.
     “Important as the struggle for existence has been and even still is,” Darwin wrote from his manor at Downs, “yet as far as the highest part of man’s nature is concerned there are other agencies more important. For the moral qualities are advanced, either directly or indirectly, much more through the effects of habit, the reasoning powers, instruction, religion, &c., than through natural selection; though to this latter agency may be safely attributed the social instincts, which afforded the basis for the development of the moral sense.”[15]  “The very idea of humanity” evolves in natural selection for conscience.[16]
    In A Passion for DNA, and in the early inclusion of ethical, legal and social issue research in the human genome project, Watson followed precisely in the footsteps of the Squire of Downs. Both especially emphasized the importance of the need to make choices in the privacy of our homes, where personal values may prevail, not in the labyrinths of government where values that may endanger the citizen may dominate. Like Darwin, he values science even when this means recognizing the work of others with whom he does not agree, even if this means taking unpopular positions. Examining the worth of a scientist, he underlines their “perfections”, popular or not, “not their imperfections.”
    Thus, Watson recognizes the contribution of Galton for raising important hypotheses, and wonders what Galton’s legacy might have been had they been testable. He is especially kind to Linus Pauling, who believed, inter alia, that the results of tests for sickle cell anemia and PKU ought to be tattooed on our foreheads at birth, perhaps like The Scarlet Letter, unquestionably like the mark of the castes of the vocationally privileged and untouchables in past Hindu culture.[17]
      An outrageous over reaction to a serious question! But Watson asks that we remember Pauling’s “perfections”, not his “imperfections.” For good reasons: Pauling was a courageous scientist with a great heart. He was also just another human who like the rest of us made mistakes.  In the same vein, while Watson is “haunted” by the Nazi era, as are most Germans, he admires the achievements of many of his German contemporaries and certainly the capacity of the current generation of German geneticists to carry on their tradition of great science. Watson asks that his German colleagues not over react, yet “come to terms” with the legacy of the past, develop ethical safeguards, and move on to applying technologies that can save lives and change the quality of life itself. He is clearly impatient with the pace of the debate and rejects popular positions on ethical issues of genetic research and application current not only in Germany, but in his own country as well. A Nazi would end the debate. He promotes the debate.
     The debate needs to be heard in the broader context of the struggle for human rights not only in Germany and the rest of Europe, but in America as well. A social revolution focused on a single set of human values that many of us now profess to share engulfed all of Europe in 1848. America was not unscathed. Its social revolution was accelerated by disheartening civil war, but did not result in the immediate implementation of human rights for minorities and immigrant workers. In Germany it began peacefully in St. Paul’s Church, Frankfurt. Some say it failed. It did not fail. Arguably, it is ending successfully, as it is in America and much of the rest of the world. Witness the global debate over the ethical application of the new biotechnologies. Given the same challenge and a common history, we must come to terms with the past together. In this dialogue, we need those who have the courage to take unpopular positions on the interface of science and society, standing under a glaring spotlight in the arena of democracy. We need James Watson to say what he says. 
    During the last great war, Bertrand Russell, another warrior for the unpopular, garmented with imperfections that could not cloak his perfections, also took the long view.
    “At the beginning of Greek philosophy,” he wrote,“ many of the philosophers were refugees from the Persians; at the end of it, in the time of Justinian, they became refugees to the Persians… In the fifth century, men of learning fled from Gaul to the Western Isles to escape the Germans; in the ninth century, they fled back from England and Ireland to escape the Scandinavians. In our own day, German philosophers have to fly even further West to escape their own compatriots. I wonder whether it will equally be long before a return flight takes place.”[18]

Sheldon W. Samuels