'Should some of us be stopped from having children?'
'Eugenics is the controversial idea that we can improve the quality
'of the human race by selecting who can and who can't reproduce.'
NEWSREEL: It would have been better by far for them
and for the rest of the community if they had never been born.
For more than a century, eugenics led innocent people, the disabled,
the poor, the non-white, to be segregated, even sterilised,
in the name of science.
It was a formative influence on Adolf Hitler
and a driving force of the Nazi death camps.
We think it has nothing to do with us but in this series
we'll find out how eugenics was, in fact, invented and promoted
within the British establishment.
My goodness.
British.
British idea.
We invented it.
The greatest horrors of the 20th century.
The ideological roots are partly right here in London
near where I live.
I'm Angela Saini, an author and a science journalist.
I'll be investigating the British scientists who came up with eugenics
and asking why it became popular.
I'll explore how this flawed idea managed to affect
town planning, our education system, immigration laws,
even attitudes to birth control.
Pop one of those over your cervix, you are literally promoting
the strength of the race.
It's off-putting as well.
I'm Adam Pearson, a reporter and disability rights activist.
I was born with a genetic condition.
I'll find out how eugenicists ruin people's lives.
He was also known as a rat catcher.
He'd go looking for people that were different.
She was treated brutally.
I want to know, are we about to enter a new age of eugenics
as medical breakthroughs give us the power to manipulate our own DNA?
There's no doubt genetic science will bring countless benefits.
But what does it mean for the disabled
or anyone not considered perfect?
If you're telling me that the world without me is a better world,
what does that say about me?
That's eugenics, isn't it? Exactly.
What will the next wave of science bring and what must we do to avoid
repeating the terrible mistakes of the past?
Philosophically, it's a minefield.
Complete minefield.
Bloomsbury in central London.
In the 19th century
this was the intellectual heart of Britain,
home to famous scientists and writers.
But I'm here to investigate the darker side
of this illustrious past.
What I really want to do is understand the connection
between this place, London and Britain, and the history
of this terrible idea.
But this is the kind of thing I really want to dig deeper into.
You know, where do these ideas come from?
Eugenics begins with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Although he had no idea how it would go on to be abused,
the implications were there,
embodied in a creature familiar to us all.
These are known as 'fancy pigeons',
bred by author and illustrator Katrina Van Grouw.
As you can see, there are lots of different pigeons of all different
colours and patterns in here.
There are white ones and what we call 'checker'.
There are red ones, black ones, all different colours of pigeons.
Charles Darwin would have felt at home here.
Like Katrina, he was an enthusiastic pigeon breeder.
By carefully picking out the breeding partner for each bird,
Darwin learned how characteristics are passed on through generations.
Your house is absolutely chock-full of skeletons
like these, and these beautiful drawings that you've done.
Thank you.
We're joined by science historian Greg Radick.
This shows beautifully, exactly what Darwin was getting at.
He wanted to document, this is the whole point of his pigeon studies,
how variable even one species, even one breed
within a species is, and your picture captures that and that's
so important for Darwin.
Darwin published his Theory Of Evolution By Natural Selection
in 1859.
Soon after, one scientist wondered what artificial breeding
might mean for humans.
He was Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin.
Galton reads the book and gets excited
because those qualities are inherited.
Galton thinks if we can do that to dogs and pigeons and horses,
what could we do to ourselves?
Imagine if we gave a 20th of the attention to improving
ourselves as a species as we give to our dogs and our cattle.
What a galaxy of genius we might create.
Galton coined the word "eugenics", meaning "well-born".
Right. So that is the start of eugenics, then.
That is the point at which people start to think
that artificial breeding of the kind that you do with pigeons
perhaps could be applied to people.
That we could do the same to ourselves? Yes, absolutely.
Following Francis Galton's trail leads me
to University College London.
Curator Subhadra Das looks after Galton's personal archive.
Subhadra, what is the connection between Galton and UCL
where we are now? That's a very good question.
He was never a professor here.
He never taught, but there is an important legacy that he left
behind to this university, which was money for a professorship
for Britain's, and possibly the world's,
first-ever chair of eugenics.
So, tell me more about Galton. Who was he?
Galton is probably the most important Victorian scientist
no-one has ever heard of.
He contributed to many different subjects, things like crime science,
things like meteorology.
He was an African explorer.
He did all of these different things, but his particular genius
was statistics, and what he wanted to do was to understand
the mechanism of heredity -
how were traits passed from parents to their children?
'Deep inside the archive are objects belonging to the eugenics department
'that Galton helped to found here
'more than a century ago.
'Among them are a few unusual items invented by Galton himself.'
I have a little box of tricks.
OK, so this...
So one of these is, they look like gardening gloves.
They do look like gardening gloves. They are gloves.
Left hand glove has been modified so there is a piece of felt,
like a little felt pocket, across the top two fingers there.
And we can take out a little piece of paper in there.
Yep. Oh, my goodness.
And then the other modification is, if you look in the thumb,
can you see what's coming out the thumb there?
There's a needle. And the needle, a sharp end of a needle.
So what was he doing, then, with that needle?
They are Galton's counting gloves and what they are is simultaneously
a covert counting and rating device.
A secret way of measuring something?
Exactly. The way that it would work, if I could demonstrate to you,
is like this.
So, at this moment in time I am counting... You're measuring.
Yeah. You can't even tell.
That's so creepy. It is, isn't it?
But what was he measuring? Gets creepier.
So what he was measuring was the relative attractiveness
of women in different metropolitan centres in Britain.
So every time a woman walks by he's making a hole in the piece
of paper and where he makes the hole is his judgment
of her attractiveness. It's just bizarre!
You can just imagine him kind of standing on a street corner,
this creepy old man with his hands in his pocket...
Watching the girls go by. ..watching the girls go by.
Why did he think this was of any use, scientific use, at all?
Well, so in terms of the eugenic state, the best babies come
from intelligent mothers and Galton equated
intelligence with attractiveness.
If this project is going to be carried out nationally
you need to know where the best incubators are. And then
from that, you take these people with the beneficial traits and get
them to breed. Absolutely.
He wanted to increase the quality of the race
because his concern was degeneration.
There's growing urbanisation, there's growing industrialisation,
there's a growing underclass of urban poor which he sees
as completely criminal, and so he's concerned that those type of people
are going to now start outnumbering HIS kind of people.
So the only way to win is to win the breeding game.
Galton set up a laboratory to measure the physical differences
between thousands of people.
To do this, he analysed vast swathes of data.
In the process he helped invent modern statistics,
including key concepts like standard deviation
and regression to the mean.
Eugenics is a discredited science but the basic ideas
that are inherent in it, we've kept the statistics.
Scientists may not go around drawing beauty maps any more,
but the idea that the way you look might somehow
determine your worth, is still alive and well.
There is a great deal of stigma that comes with disability
and disfigurement.
For example, I've been assaulted,
I'm getting yelled at in the street.
Things like "Quasimodo", "The Elephant Man"
"Spastic", "Big Head", "Freak".
Camera phones coming out.
If you have a disability, you are somehow less human, or subhuman.
If I'd lived a hundred years ago when eugenics was new,
when eugenics was kind of the iPad of its time,
how would my life have turned out?
To understand this, I'm investigating the way Galton thought
looks could be used to identify the right sort of people,
those who should breed, and the wrong sort of people,
those who should not.
In the 1880s, he visited the famous mental asylum Bethlem, to take
photographs of the inmates.
I'm with disability historian Richard Rieser.
So, a lot of Galton's research is based on the fact
that someone could literally look like an idiot,
like if their head was a certain measurement,
or if the statistics and data pointed a certain way
that they'd be deemed incapable.
Is that correct?
Yes.
Well, that was his hypothesis, and he then sought to prove
that by taking pictures, measurements, to try and prove
that this was a distinct group in the population.
And so, for instance, this first woman
with a very sullen expression,
she's staring vacantly at the camera,
she isn't really looking after how she looks and he's trying
to say from this, you can deduce that this is someone
with mental deficiency.
This young man, the same sort of thing.
But if you look at prison mugshots you would get the same thing
and that doesn't mean that all those people are mentally deficient.
It means that people are in a situation they don't want
to be in and are being forced to have their picture taken.
And his mission was to try and establish
that there was this different subspecies of human beings,
the mentally defective.
ANGELA: This was not good science.
We know that now.
But despite its many flaws, Galton and his colleagues succeeded
in establishing eugenics as a serious subject.
At UCL he helped fund what would become
the Francis Galton Laboratory For National Eugenics.
Researchers here weren't just occupied with disabled people
and the so-called mentally deficient.
They also turned their eyes to people of other races.
In the early 1900s, we begin to see disturbing links
between British researchers at UCL and race scientists in Germany.
Subhadra, that is just the creepiest thing I've ever seen.
So these are glass eyes? These are glass eyes.
But why was this important to understand that people
have different eye colours and why? What does it matter?
Well, because it's associated with racial types.
So this
is very similar to the eye gauge that we were just looking at,
but this time it's with hair.
So you'll see it says, "hair colour gauge,
Professor Doctor Eugen Fischer."
So this is an object of Fischer's design,
and as you can see, there's different hair colours represented.
So I would be somewhere here, 20... Well, both of us would. Yeah, 27.
Exactly.
And this device is specifically designed to measure the relative
whiteness of mixed heritage people.
And he is measuring the relative whiteness of people
who are the children of European soldiers and native African women.
This object has a sinister history.
It was used in the early 1900s as German Imperial forces quashed
an uprising in their colonies in southwest Africa,
murdering as many as 80,000 people in the first genocide
of the 20th century.
The designer of the hair gauge, Eugen Fischer, experimented
on prisoners, injecting them with tuberculosis and smallpox
and measuring decapitated skulls.
Fischer wrote books condemning racial mixing and justifying
white racial superiority.
His work would directly influence Hitler and Nazi policy.
And just two years after the end of the genocide in southwest Africa,
the Fischer hair gauge ended up here at UCL
to be used by this man.
Professor Karl Pearson was Galton's protege and the first chair
of National Eugenics after Galton died.
Professor Gavin Schaffer, a historian,
has looked at the research that Pearson carried out
in London's East End
to build his theories of racial difference.
Gavin has a personal connection to this.
My great grandparents would have lived in this neighbourhood.
They, in fact, did just live up the road and I am part of the...
well, like so many of us are,
I am part of the story that you're telling.
The Jews' Free School in the East End
was among the places Pearson visited.
He wanted to carry out physical and mental tests
on the children of immigrants.
His work ended up in a report that was full of racial stereotypes.
"Taken on the average, this alien Jewish population is somewhat
"inferior, physically and mentally to the native population.
"They will develop into a parasitic race."
Pearson's claim was that the British race was degenerating.
The eugenics solution was to stop Jewish immigration.
The argument that he's trying to make is if it can be showed
that this immigrant population is weaker, worse than the general
population, then there is a case for not allowing more of them
to come to Britain.
Pressure from eugenicists like Pearson hit their mark.
Laws passed before and after the time of the First World War
placed tougher restrictions on immigration.
The work of eugenicists feeds into social thinking as politicians
are deciding to restrict immigration to stop poor immigrants coming
from Eastern Europe, if they possibly can.
Their ideas are shaped by social Darwinist, eugenical thinking
on racial superiority and inferiority.
So today, do you think we still live with a legacy of those ideas?
I mean, do we still think in these terms now?
Immigrant communities, refugee communities, continue to face
hostility, to be targeted by legislation
that tries to keep them out.
We still want to keep a fence around our nation.
And whilst I don't think it would be fair to say
that the principles keeping up that fence are now eugenical,
it probably doesn't feel that different
when you're on the wrong end of it.
Nowadays, we live in a climate where we generally understand
that racism is wrong, but I think we still are attached to ideas
that between our different ethnicities, there are solid,
firm, maybe even natural differences and it would be silly not to see
that there is a line from those ideas that we still hold, all the
way back to the eugenics movement.
ADAM: In the years leading up to the First World War these eugenic fears
that the British race was getting weaker alarmed senior politicians,
both Liberal and Conservative.
Winston Churchill, who became Home Secretary in 1910,
was an influential advocate of eugenics.
"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded
"and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction
"among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes
"a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate."
The growing intellectual enthusiasm for eugenics was captured
in this film, presented by leading British biologist Julian Huxley.
NARRATION: Here is a man who, although normal, comes from
a mentally defective family.
Here is his wife who is also normal,
who had 17 children. Seven children are all mental defectives.
How has this disastrous state of affairs come about?
If we examine the pedigree of this family
we find that although the father and mother of the youngest generation
are both normal, the father's brother was insane.
We thus see how mental deficiency has passed
from one generation to another.
But it would have been better by far, for them
and for the rest of the community, if they had never been born.
OMINOUS MUSIC
British eugenicists campaigned hard to ensure
that so-called "feeble-minded" families were removed
from the national gene pool.
The result was the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913.
Thanks to opposition from the Catholic Church and some MPs,
it stopped short of an official sterilisation programme.
Instead, dozens of colonies of what they called
the "mentally deficient", were set up.
NARRATION: In institutions such as this all over the country,
mental defectives are cared for.
These are children who are helpless in every way
and need constant attention.
At the height of the operation of the Act, up to 65,000 people
were kept in these colonies.
So, the whole thing was geared
so there wouldn't be any sexual liaisons.
Of course they found a way of getting together,
but then the doctors in charge of the place would make sure
that they didn't have the baby through abortion
and then they would sterilise them.
And this was all unlawful, but it happened.
I wanted to know more about how people were chosen to be locked up
and what it meant for them.
And what's this? Who's Mabel Cooper?
Well, Mabel Cooper was at one of these hospitals, St Lawrence's,
and she was picked up in Islington because it was deemed her mother
couldn't look after her and she was then assessed a number of times.
Here we have a case paper of her mental deficiency.
We have a Doctor Casey saying,
"This is an imbecile girl of 13 whose intelligence is not superior
"to that of an average seven-year-old,
"incapable of telling the time."
And then the second doctor says,
"She can read only a few two and three-letter words,
"hesitant guessing manner.
"She says sixpence and twopence is threepence."
So that was the test.
I find this whole concept quite malicious and terrifying
in that Mabel herself was never considered.
And her removal from society
was more to benefit society than to safeguard her. Absolutely.
It was a shocking life for these people, really.
I find it upsetting to hear that a cursory examination
by two doctors could have a child like Mabel Cooper
locked up, sometimes for decades.
The fact it was very much a state-mandated thing
is completely terrifying.
Erm, you know, there is still an undertone of that
but it's not written in law,
it's more put out on Twitter by idiots now.
It was very much a well-respected, well-thought-through science,
but really high profile people
like, even Churchill was a eugenicist.
They don't mention that in the films and the books,
but very much a eugenicist.
ANGELA: Lost in the haze of the eugenic dream are ordinary people,
women, men, and children like Mabel.
The question for me is how could individual lives be so easily
sacrificed for a scientific idea?
An idea that continues to shape how we live today.
At the Wellcome Trust in London, Dr Bonnie Evans takes me
through the writings of a child psychologist
whose job was to measure children's intelligence
to help implement the Mental Deficiency Act.
Cyril Burt is a psychologist.
He's the first official psychologist appointed
to the London County Council in 1913
and he was an incredibly powerful person.
Burt came up with his own tests to assess a child's mental capacity.
Today, we would call this an IQ test.
This one is comparing lines,
looking at which line is the longest or the shortest.
These ones are to do with comparing faces,
so children will be asked
to look at the differences in the facial features.
A child who failed could be sent to an institution.
As a eugenicist,
Cyril Burt was convinced that intelligence was mostly inherited.
To him, a child he considered to be mentally feeble
probably couldn't be helped.
In 1933 he becomes professor of UCL,
at UCL, and he works very closely with government
on many consultative committees on education.
When, after the war, new moves are made to extend education
and to make secondary education available to all,
Burt's ideas of classifying and dividing at age 11 are used.
Under the 11 Plus system, every pupil took an exam, and based
on their results, they'd be sent to a grammar school,
a secondary modern or a technical college.
The system was largely phased out by 1977.
But even so, many selective schools across the country
still use a form of 11 Plus today.
Right, so Burt's ideas are what led to the system
that many parts of the country still live with now.
Yeah, yeah, and you know, the obsession with testing individuals
as well, you know,
that was something that, Burt was the originator of...
The legacy of these people is still alive,
that we live with it and it's affecting us.
It's affected me in the tests that I've took when I was growing up
and it will affect my children. Yeah. That's right.
So yeah, children are still being tested in this way.
I found it incredibly disturbing and sad
listening to what Bonnie had to say.
What hurts the most is knowing that we still live with these ideas
now, through the selective education system.
We're still trying to grapple with
this incredibly
ethically fraught idea of how do we give kids
the best possible start in life
and so many mistakes have been made
in the process of figuring this out.
During the inter-war period, a time of technological optimism,
many believed eugenics offered a rational, scientific answer
to social problems.
Even some of the most progressive members of society,
people I think of as heroes,
imagined that eugenics might make Britain better.
This is the site of an early birth control clinic
opened in London in 1925 by feminist pioneer Marie Stopes.
I've always admired her.
But there's another side to the Stopes story,
one that lies in the vaults of the Science Museum.
Tell me more about Marie Stopes. What kind of person was she?
I suppose I always see Marie Stopes as somebody who knew she was right
and she was utterly convinced that her way of doing things
was the only way of doing things.
She definitely broke a lot of taboos.
At that point in time then,
how important was birth control to people?
Were people using contraceptives generally?
It was probably more of a middle-class thing,
more educated people knew what to do and how to go about it.
But this was not the case for the working classes.
In her clinics, Stopes gave poor and working class women access
to birth control.
Why did that bother her?
Why did she care so much that the working classes
weren't getting access to contraceptives?
I think what's important for us to understand is that, at this time,
birth control was really synonymous with eugenics.
Right, OK. So that's not something that we make the connection for
today at all, it's very much a personal choice
but certainly in the inter-war period,
eugenics and birth control go hand-in-hand.
They are almost the same thing.
They were worried that,
particularly the middle classes
or the more prudent careful and healthy people,
were producing children at a much slower rate
than the imprudent and feckless,
and people who are less physically strong, who were producing children
at a rate that they found very alarming.
Not only was it the theory behind her work
but actually it was very much part of the brand.
So, we've got here two examples of a cervical cap
and it's just...classic barrier method of contraception.
But if you look more closely at these caps,
you can actually see the words "Pro Race" on them.
So, literally, if you're about to have sex and you pop one
of those over your cervix to make sure you don't get pregnant,
you are literally promoting the strength of the race
by doing that and you've got it written over your cervix.
It's quite shocking. It is.
It's offputting, as well, I imagine!
I suppose, really, instead of improving diet and housing,
the idea was that they were poor because they were being profligate
and having too many children, and therefore, if you tackle
that angle, then the health of society would improve.
And it was incredibly complicated because often, you know,
working women themselves would be desperate not to have
any more children. I mean, there's heart-rending letters of them,
you know, writing and saying you know, we know that there is a way
of stopping this. How do we stop it?
Because if you can't afford to care for the children you've got,
then you don't want any more.
And that is why Marie Stopes was such a pioneering feminist figure
and so important for women, because she gave us that freedom.
You know, she allowed us to be able to have the choice
not to have more children than we wanted.
And I mean, that's the complexity of her legacy then, I suppose.
On the one hand we know she was a eugenicist -
she has "race" written on the same contraceptives
that she was handing out,
but at the same time, she liberated us.
I think what's really important for us to remember
is that eugenics was not some strange frowned-on sideline.
This was absolutely mainstream.
I wanted to know more about the victims of eugenics,
the people in the 1920s and '30s
who were locked up in colonies
for the so called mentally deficient.
So I'm curious. What were these places like?
It's one thing hearing about all this
in a historical context
as to how the 1913 Act played itself out.
But what were these places actually like?
Could you live there? Could you work there?
What were the day-to-day operations and lifestyles like
of the people living there?
I'm...I'm fascinated.
So, we're off to a place in Leeds called Meanwood Park
that was one of many institutions up and down the country.
I'm going to go and talk to a guy called Mark Davis
who has an archive, knows the people's stories.
This particular block here is the old mansion.
They housed 87 people.
It was pretty tough.
You know, you came in here and the first thing
they did was segregate you, segregate the sexes.
Because it was all about,
erm, stopping them procreating, you see?
So you would have the male and female separated.
They'd put you to work.
If you were bad, they'd put you in seclusion cells,
they'd have you scrubbing, they'd have you doing all sorts of things.
It sounds a lot like prison.
Yeah, essentially.
And anybody coming in here's a mental defective.
It was always classed, once mentally defective,
always mentally defective.
So it was really an arbitrary life sentence.
You didn't get out. You wasn't ever going to get out.
And, of course, when you take that kind of thing away from somebody,
you take away the most precious thing, which is hope itself,
because without hope, what have you got?
Mark tells me the story of Samuel Wormald.
He was an enthusiastic and terrifying county official
whose job was to select potential inmates.
There was a chap employed as what they call the Executive Officer
and he was a eugenicist and was called Samuel Wormald.
And he was like the bogeyman.
You know, the kids, they're like "the bogeyman's going to get you",
you're going to end up in Meanwood Park and end up in the nuthouse,
all this sort of thing.
And he was also known as a rat catcher.
And he was the man that specifically went out
looking for "special" people, people that were different.
He'd go into the schools, he'd go into the mills.
And initially, when he were bringing people in here, especially the kids,
he'd actually bring them in the basket in the front of his bicycle.
So I could have been like just down the park or at school,
minding my own business.
Samuel could have been... You'd have been spied.
He was looking for all sorts of people.
The deaf, the blind, the dumb, anybody.
He brought them in here and this guy, you know,
when he retired in 1939, he was quite proud of the fact
that he'd captured over 2,000 people - men, women and children -
and put them in the largest mental deficiency colony in Yorkshire.
It sounds a lot like kidnapping.
Just going round, picking up people...on his bike.
Well, it was all about eugenics.
They didn't want these people to breed again.
So they put them in here. Containment.
Segregation and containment.
And do not allow them to procreate.
Meeting Mark today was good but also kind of sinister.
Before I started this journey
I'd only heard of eugenics in kind of vague generalities.
It's kind of a cliche, "Ooh, it were well rough back in t'day..."
whereas to come and talk to someone who's passionate about it
and knows about it and has essentially made it his life,
to hear kind of people were here for 50, 60 years for no good reason.
And if I'd have been born here in like the '20s,
as opposed to Croydon in the '80s,
I'd have been picked up by some nutter on a bike
and I'd have been here for the rest of my life.
It's just terrifying.
The 1920s and '30s were a time
when Britain was locking disabled people away
in places like Meanwood,
and yet it was also a time when it seemed possible
to design a better way of living.
New towns like this appeared -
Welwyn Garden City, founded in 1920.
The person behind this was Ebenezer Howard,
a planning visionary
who lived here until he died in the utopia he had designed.
And there was a sense that you could create environments
that would actually uplift people, that would make them...
Historian Dr Sue Correll
has studied Howard's garden cities movement.
So, Ebenezer Howard, his idea was based on utopian ideas
that you could transform people's lives
by putting them in the right environment.
Howard produced these stylised plans outlining his radical vision.
What you see here is a perfectly rationally planned garden city.
You have the municipal centre of the largest city in the middle,
and then satellite towns around the edge.
Everyone has a garden where they can grow their own vegetables.
Everyone has enough space to live and to have children,
and to have big families - big, healthy families.
In these towns, everyone has their place
and those who eugenicists considered less desirable
were separated, kept well away from the rest.
Here you have the epileptic farms.
There's a home for waifs
so these are kind of homeless, unwanted people.
Home for inebriates. Yeah.
And there's an insane asylum here.
There's a separation of the desirable
and the undesirable.
The desirable people get to live in the cities and the nice suburbs
with their beautiful names like Philadelphia and Concord,
and everybody else is stuck in these kind of in-between places.
The underlying influences on this definitely come
from eugenic ideas about uplift and improvement
but also segregation and separation.
Many influential inter-war figures were drawn to eugenics.
Policies encouraging the healthy to have children
and discouraging the poor from doing so
seemed like a scientific way of improving society.
This vision attracted the likes of Sidney and Beatrice Webb
of the Fabian Society...
..and William Beveridge, creator of the welfare state.
I think that's what I learnt in Welwyn Garden City.
Here is a place that I could see myself living
and it was built on these principles of living a healthy, positive life
in a society built on very rational, scientific principles.
This idea that we can create a utopian future,
that we can use the science and technology of the time
to solve society's problems,
I can't help but wonder if I had been around at that time
and been part of those intellectual circles, whether these ideas
would have appealed to me, too.
And it's quite a disturbing thought.
ADAM: Support for eugenics peaked in the 1920s
and spread out of Britain and was taken up across Europe and America.
It became the mantra of the day.
You have beauty contests organized,
you have literary festivals organized, people writing poems.
You have drawings organized about the ideal type of human being.
So it really becomes part and parcel of what we call today
"popular culture".
Professor Marius Turda
is a leading expert in the field.
He talks me through how all this turned very dark.
During the 1920s,
several US states passed eugenic laws.
Over the following decades,
around 60,000 people were forcibly sterilised.
European eugenicists watched with interest.
There is a lot of conversation already in the 1920s amongst
eugenicists in America and Germany, and to some extent, Britain,
about the best way forward to achieve the perfect society.
Adolf Hitler was an early fan of American eugenics,
praising it in Mein Kampf.
Nazi sterilisation laws were directly influenced
by sterilisation policies in the USA.
It's impossible to blame the Holocaust on any one thing.
But along with anti-Semitism and nationalism,
eugenics was a key part of the Nazi vision.
It inspired something called Aktion T4,
a project to murder the disabled.
With respect to eugenic arguments, I think the T4 programme is,
in a way, illustrative of how the Nazi regime
saw the creation of the internal cleansing of the national body,
getting rid of all the weeds, defectives,
people who don't conform.
And indeed, do not tolerate any form of disability whatsoever.
Aktion T4 began in 1939.
Hitler ordered his personal doctor Karl Brandt
and SS officer Philipp Bouhler
to implement a programme to kill people
considered to carry hereditary defects.
During the 1930s, the Nazis funded films and posters
stressing how much people with hereditary illnesses
cost the taxpayer.
This poster shows a disabled person cost the taxpayer
60,000 reichsmarks.
Big argument on the propaganda posters about the T4,
about how much money people with disability cost the state.
If you're not useful at all, then why do you exist for?
The individual was nothing.
Society, or in the case of Nazi Germany, race,
was everything.
The SS trialled poison gas on disabled people.
As part of Aktion T4,
300,000 people,
including several thousand children, were murdered.
ANGELA: As I've been learning on this journey, Hitler's theories
of racial hygiene didn't emerge out of a vacuum.
They arose out of a scientific and political context
that was part of the mainstream here in Britain.
It's a history that curator of the Galton Collection
Subhadra Das has also struggled with.
It's just shocking to think that these ideas,
the birthplace of these ideas, wasn't in Nazi Germany.
It was right here, near where I live. Exactly.
And in the university in which I work. We invented it.
Galton is a British scientist.
If you say "eugenics", immediately, if people have even heard the word,
they will think "Nazis". But no. British. British idea.
It's difficult to get your head around the fact that this,
the greatest horrors of the 20th century,
the ideological roots are partly right here in London,
near where I live.
I always find it difficult not to judge people by modern standards
but at the same time,
maybe we can blame him, partly, for the legacies of these ideas
and what came after he died.
But I feel morally conflicted about it because...
..because he was also a man of his time.
'I want to find out, how do modern-day scientists reflect
'on this complicated legacy?
'I'm on my way to meet the current head of what was, for decades,
'The Eugenics Society.
'It's now known as The Galton Institute.'
She's a very distinguished geneticist in her own right.
She's had a very illustrious career
and what I really want to understand is,
what does the legacy of Francis Galton mean to her?
Why does she feel that
an institute like this is still appropriate
and what she is doing leading it?
'Veronica van Heyningen could not be further from a eugenicist.
'Her research has advanced medical knowledge
by identifying genetic mutations
'associated with serious eye diseases.'
Well, I don't think, I don't know.
I, I don't think so.
She knows better than most the murderous consequences
of 20th-century race science.
So, these are my parents.
Survivor of Mauthausen and of Auschwitz,
Ravensbruck and Buchenwald.
I do think a lot about my parents
and wish I'd asked them more questions.
My father never talked about his experiences
but my mother talked quite a lot.
My mother was in Auschwitz,
as a Jew, of course,
and all her family were killed in Auschwitz.
So I had no grandparents on that side or the other side, actually.
My father had been taken to a labour camp
and he survived that and they married after the war.
And I was born in Hungary in 1946.
The Nazis wanted to purify the race.
It's a really terrible idea ethically,
but actually, in my view, biologically, as well
because the greater diversity we can maintain,
I think the better it is for the world.
Quite incredible to have that knowledge,
to know that the terrible uses of eugenics... Absolutely.
..but then, for you now in the 21st century,
to be head of The Galton Institute
which used to be The Eugenics Society.
I mean, how do you square that?
I just know that they are just not involved in any way in eugenics now
and that what we spend our efforts on is to bring modern genetics
to as many people as we can.
In order to avoid genetic abnormalities
we need to understand them
and that has been my life's work, really.
But how does it feel for you to know that Galton's name is still used
in these contexts, that the name of the institute that you're heading
carries his name? Do you feel...
I mean, how do you feel about Galton now?
I think he was a great geneticist.
I mean, he was he was the person who coined the term "eugenics",
and he was, he was racist, as well.
I think people took his ideas
and subverted them to much worse use
and I think it would be much better
not to forget about Galton, but to talk about him.
If we start along the line of rejecting all the people
who had troubling and now-dismissed ideas
and, along with that, reject all their other work as well,
we're going to get into tremendous difficulties.
I think it's very risky to judge people by the standards of our time,
for obvious reasons.
We know that, we know all the terrible things that happened
in the 20th century and the consequences of eugenics,
but they didn't know that.
Because the view was that eugenics could have offered
this glittering, wonderful new society very quickly, this utopia.
Erm...
And I guess that's a lesson for us now
to be careful when new science comes along,
to not rush to...
..deploy it in the real world,
to think about the consequences of it
and, erm, be careful.
Right at the beginning of my journey,
I heard about the story of Mabel Cooper.
She was locked up in 1957
after a cursory examination by two doctors.
There is no way you can escape these walls.
Mabel spent two decades in an institution.
But as I found out, it wasn't the end of her story.
Right.
Welcome...
..to Paradise Fields.
While you are here
you will be doing daily chores.
I'm in east London with theatre company Access All Areas.
They've researched Mabel Cooper's life for a play
about her experiences.
On your marks...
Mable was eventually sent to an institution
called St Lawrence's Hospital
where she was treated
fucking brutally, seriously.
She wasn't taught to read or write,
she wasn't allowed to wear her own clothes,
and it gave her what I call a secondary handicap,
not a natural handicap but a secondary handicap.
And if you think about it, this wasn't hundreds of years ago.
This was, it was only in the 1950s that she was in these institutions
and she was there for a long time.
Yeah, yeah. And it's kind of a scary thought,
that to think if kind of you or I
had been born kind of 50, 60, 70 years ago... Yeah, God...
..this would have been us.
You are here because society has no room for you!
Access All Areas have invited me to take part in rehearsals.
Quickly.
In this scene, inmates queue up to brush their teeth,
sharing one toothbrush for every five people.
We're all doing our bit to make the now late Mabel Cooper,
proud, you know, and hundreds, if not thousands, of these
patients all around the world
have been in this, this awful, brutal position.
You will now scrub the floor.
Right. Start scrubbing.
Part of the theatre company is Harvey Waterman.
He was certified under the Mental Deficiency Act at the age of four.
He spent 29 years at St Lawrence's at the same time as Mabel Cooper.
Would you be able to tell me about your time in St Lawrence's?
Well, it wasn't all that good.
Why? Why not?
Because they kept the doors locked.
If you wanted to go out, they had to unlock the door.
And what was the day-to-day like?
Just wasn't good.
Well, every time you tried to do anything,
was all these tablets,
you had to share the toothbrush,
all the time.
The system at St Lawrence's was designed to stop the inmates
from having children.
Was there any kind of social activities?
A dance hall.
We had to go to the dances.
SWING-STYLE JAZZ
All the men were one side
and the women were the other side.
Back to your places.
We couldn't mix, we couldn't go on the female corridors.
Did you want to go on the female corridors?
I'd like to see Gloria again.
Tell me more about Gloria.
She was my first friend.
How did you meet? We met at the hospital.
And were you friends?
Were you more than friends?
Well, she was my first girlfriend.
And how was that?
That was great.
Because she was quite nice.
And how would you feel now,
kind of looking back at your experience
in St Lawrence's?
It makes me a bit happier being out.
What would you say to people who may find themselves,
for whatever reason, in similar circumstances?
Find a way of getting out.
As for Mabel Cooper,
she left St Lawrence's in 1977.
She'd then join and eventually ran an organization
campaigning for people with learning disabilities.
She was an inspirational person to many,
co-authoring a book and receiving an honorary degree.
For me, one of the worst aspects of eugenics was
it caused so many talented people to be shut out of society.
So would you say that this kind of,
what is almost eugenic thinking
is still echoing throughout the decades to now?
Back in, like, the 19th century, they used to have freak shows.
Like, people like you and me would be...
Well, I would I would be the village idiot.
You would be the elephant man.
Yeah. Sorry to say it but... I say it about myself.
These days, you know, we can't afford a repeat
of the last of the last 60,
of the last hundred years.
We've come far.
But our journey is far from over.
After my experiences with Access All Areas,
I've decided to come on a small pilgrimage.
'So, where I'm standing is all that now remains
'of what was St Lawrence's.
'The railings and the pillars are all that stand.
'There's a blue plaque to commemorate the whole thing.
'What lies beyond here now
'is actually a very nice housing estate.'
So I've not necessarily come here to see St Lawrence's,
because it doesn't exist any more.
I just wanted to come and see what they would look out on, what,
what they would see as a world that I very much take for granted.
And to see the actual physical parameters of their existence.
For them, this would have been like a harsh reality.
The basic freedoms I take for granted,
like the ability to pop round the corner for a coffee
or pop over the road for a pint,
just would not have existed.
It's erm, it's a bit haunting, really.
'In the next episode, we investigate how the influence of eugenics
'continued long after the war.'
We have eight million sterilisation happening in India
within one year. That's shocking. Eight million!
ADAM: And do recent medical breakthroughs,
combined with prejudice, mean
we're about to enter a new era of eugenics?
"I think we need to kill these people.
"At the very least, imprison them."
Should some of us be stopped from having children?
Eugenics is the controversial belief
that we can improve the human race
by selecting who can and who can't reproduce.
It would have been better by far, for them
and for the rest of the community, if they had never been born.
Eugenics was notoriously used to justify the Holocaust.
But we've seen that it was first developed and promoted
by British scientists and politicians.
My goodness.
British.
British idea.
We invented it.
It's led to disabled, poor and non-white people
being locked up and sterilised.
The greatest horrors of the 20th century,
the ideological roots were partly right here in London,
near where I live.
I'm Angela Saini, an author and science journalist.
Now I want to investigate how eugenics rebranded itself
after the horrors of the Second World War,
and how its devastating legacy continued across the world.
We have eight million sterilisations happening in India within one year.
That's shocking. Eight million!
We'll see how eugenics-style attitudes
towards the poor remain with us in today's Britain.
It is, quite explicitly, a message to some to parts of society -
"We think you're having too many children."
I'm Adam Pearson, a reporter and disability rights activist.
I was born with a genetic condition.
I want to explore - do medical breakthroughs,
combined with prejudice against disabled people,
mean we are on the verge of a new era of eugenics?
I think we need to kill these people, right?
At the very least, imprison them.
Could we be heading for a society where anyone not considered perfect
will be prevented from being born?
If you're telling me that the world without me is a better world,
what does that say about me?
Well, that's eugenics, isn't it?
Exactly.
Philosophically, it's a minefield.
Complete minefield.
In the aftermath of World War II,
the horrors of the Holocaust became widely known.
But few connected these events with the work of British scientists.
Eugenics, one of the ideologies
driving the Nazis' genocidal project,
originated in Victorian London.
It had become part of mainstream British thought,
and even helped shape government policy.
This was now an inconvenient truth,
and most British advocates of eugenics
distanced themselves from it.
But some did not.
This is King's College, London,
where I studied as a postgraduate.
I've asked to see the collected papers of
Reginald Ruggles Gates.
Professor of Botany here,
he continued to espouse openly eugenic views throughout the 1950s.
My goodness.
So this is a skin colour chart.
And it shows at the beginning, it says,
"Represents the skin colour of an individual coloured person."
So this is presumably someone who isn't racially mixed,
and the skin colour of a white person who isn't racially mixed,
and then lots of colours in between.
And the purpose of this is to look at racial mixing,
so that he can identify who is more mixed and who isn't.
He was obsessed by skin colour, clearly.
I mean, he's drawn up a chart, for goodness' sake.
And here it comes in a wheel, as well.
Gates believed that racial intermarriage
would cause mental and physical disabilities.
"Would dilute and degrade the more advanced race," was how he put it.
Gates believed that races were different species,
so not just that we have superficial differences like skin colour,
but that we evolved separately.
And so for him, there was a real danger here in races mixing.
In the early 1960s,
Gates helped found a notorious journal called
Mankind Quarterly, which argued for eugenics.
It was influential with supporters of racial segregation in America
and apartheid in South Africa.
Even today, it's present in the toxic ideologies of the far right.
Gates's interest in race spans so far,
that in his papers I even stumbled on something personal to me.
I was looking through the catalogue.
One mentioned Sainis, which is my surname, so I've got this here.
The study of ABO Blood Groups of Sainis of Punjab.
The subjects of various districts was studied in Punjab -
Hoshiarpur, Jullundur and Ambala.
Hoshiarpur is where my father's family are from.
So these were blood tests taken from people who could well
very easily have been members of my family at the time.
And that's so strange.
It's unnerving.
Although this paper wasn't written by Gates,
he collected it as part of a scientific quest
to promote racial difference.
We need to read this.
We need to understand the history of this because if we don't,
then it just gets swept under the carpet.
So even though it's painful to read it, and personally painful,
especially for me, it's incredibly important, I think, that we see it.
And I'm glad this archive is here.
Investigating eugenics,
I know I'd uncover stories of people whose lives
have been deeply damaged.
But I didn't realise how disturbing it would be to meet them in person.
Elena is a member of the Roma community
who live in the Czech Republic.
In 1990, in hospital for the birth of her second child,
Elena had no idea what was about to happen to her.
She was told later that as her previous two children
had been born via Caesarean section,
she was sterilised to prevent further risky pregnancies.
But she was never consulted,
and soon found out that other Romany women have had similar experiences.
Why do you think you were sterilised?
Why Romany women in particular?
Elena is now the head of a group of Romany women
who all claim they were sterilised,
and have campaigned for years for justice.
Recently, a Czech MP introduced a bill to the country's parliament
to compensate them for what happened to them.
A bit messed up, isn't it, that
a woman who was already from a marginalised community just died.
It angers me.
That this is happening in the '90s,
I can't get my head around
that timeline at all.
I've been saying for a while now, "This could have been me."
But in reality, it could've been anyone.
Anyone could have been handed a document to sign in a blind panic
and then been sterilised.
It's a little known fact that sterilisation policies carried
on in many countries after the war.
In Sweden, more than 60,000 people were sterilised
to improve racial purity in a state programme
which carried on until the mid-1970s.
Two Canadian provinces and 33 American states
practised sterilisation before and after the war.
North Carolina alone sterilised more than 7,000 people.
Historian Marius Turda has investigated
how sterilisation programmes were the result of years
of lobbying by American and European eugenicists.
He begins by telling me about Carlos Blacker,
the general secretary of the British Eugenics Society from 1931 to 1952.
He was a very important eugenicist, both before and after 1945.
Blacker joined forces with people like Margaret Sanger,
the American Birth Control activist and eugenicist.
They campaigned against overpopulation in places like India.
By 1952, they all convened in Bombay, India,
to actually convince the Indian governments
that the only way to deal with poverty
is to diminish the fertility rates.
We need to bring some form of
eugenic therapy, inverted commas, to countries such as India.
And the Indian government is finally persuaded.
The Indian government offered cash to its citizens to get sterilised.
I mean, these are enormous figures.
So just in this one place in Madras
between 1956 and 1962,
more than 55,000 people were sterilised.
In the 1960s and '70s,
as India suffered natural disasters and famine,
the American government and aid agencies
made it clear to the Indian authorities
that if they wanted aid,
they would have to control the population.
Lyndon Johnson told one of his advisers,
"I'm not going to piss away foreign aid in nations
"where they refuse to deal with their own population problems."
The message got through.
In the mid-1970s, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
suspended democratic rule and her son, Sanjay Gandhi,
led an extraordinary campaign to reduce the country's birth rate.
And by 1976-77,
we have eight million sterilisations happening in India within one year.
Shocking. Eight million!
I can't...
Yes, it is quite a number.
It is shocking to me that I don't know that. Yes.
The Indian government didn't call this policy eugenics.
It was framed as an answer to famine,
but human rights critics argue that the burden of sterilisation
fell heavily on India's poor, echoing the history of eugenics.
We have stories about bulldozers going into very poor neighbourhoods
and, you know, fishing out the men and sterilising them.
There's some speculation that up to this point maybe we're talking
about 40 million people sterilised in India since 1950 to this day.
It's important not to damn the whole population control movement.
They weren't all eugenicists.
Many were driven by sincere environmental concerns,
or to improve women's access to birth control.
Not all of these people are eugenicists.
There are lots of people interested in population issues
who are not eugenicists.
However, it was the big figures in this movement, at least
in the 1950s, had that eugenic inclination.
Well, I think one thing that is recurrent in the story of eugenics
throughout the 20th century
is that the target always seems to be the poorest.
Whether that's the poorest within British society
or whether that's the poor wherever they happen to be in the world.
Just goes to show that that element
of wanting to get rid of poor people one way or another remains.
And, in some ways, is the darkest element of eugenics that, you know,
only the wealthy should be allowed to have children.
That has never changed. That's been the constant throughout.
The other side of the British eugenic vision
was to encourage the educated middle classes to have more children,
something eugenicists pushed even after the war.
I'm meeting a retired academic with a strange story.
In the early 1960s,
Hilary Rose and her husband
were working at the London School of Economics.
To Hilary's surprise,
the LSC quietly offered an incentive to academics to have more babies.
Why?
Because they were seen as the brightest and the best.
And it was funny.
What we got was £50 for every child that you had.
And how was this presented to you?
It just was there in your payslip.
I mean, nobody told you about it.
You just thought, "Where did this money come from?"
So for all the extra children you had...
We had two children. Right.
We got £200.
If we'd only had one academic, obviously a male academic,
then they would have only got £100.
Remarkably, the scheme
had originally been proposed in the 1920s,
by then LSC director William Beveridge,
the future architect of the welfare state.
He had been fascinated by the idea of positive eugenics.
When you look back on that now,
now in the 21st century,
how do you feel about it?
Well, a bit guilty.
I mean, it's, you know, it was so unjust.
But did you feel at all flattered that you were considered
the desirable parents, that you were the good people?
I mean, we just laughed about it.
I mean, look, I'm married to a biologist.
I mean, he knows the whole thing is just scientific garbage.
I regard it as just monstrous.
You know, if you believe that all children should be treated
with love and care and have a good life.
I mean, how could I feel that as an incentive?
Hilary went on to have a distinguished career
as a sociologist.
She's spoken out against the promotion of eugenics
under the guise of population control or social improvement.
What do you do if you've got a litter of dogs
and one is the runt of the litter?
You strangle it, or you put it in a bucket of water.
And that's how I think the ruling strata thought about the people,
is that you want to look after it,
you want to look after the national stock.
I couldn't have imagined that eugenics
would continue in Britain after the war.
But now I'm wondering if its key dogma -
that the poor are some kind of burden - has survived.
The phrase "Problem Families"
was used by the Eugenics Society in the 1950s
to describe an underclass in which crime, poverty
and unemployability runs through generations.
More recent politicians don't talk about this
as a genetic problem,
but they have talked in terms of culture and society.
In 1974, senior Conservative politician Keith Joseph said
the human stock was threatened by poor people breeding too much.
In 2006,
Tony Blair said problem families were a menace to society.
And in 2011, after riots in British cities,
David Cameron laid some of the blame on troubled families.
I think we've all known for years
that a relatively small number of families
are the source of a large proportion of problems in our society.
Drug addiction, alcohol abuse, crime,
a culture of disruption and irresponsibility
that cascades through generations.
But in recent years, a series of reports and inquiries
have debunked the notion that unemployment
and crime run in families.
Professor Jonathan Portes was one of a number of experts asked
by the government to carry out an independent evaluation
of its troubled families programme.
The myth of intergenerational worklessness
has been comprehensively exploded.
There are very, very few families that are workless
for more than one generation,
let alone for two or three generations.
There's always been a view that there were the deserving poor
and the undeserving poor.
The way it's sold or justified is typically with, you know,
a spread in a tabloid newspaper of a mum with ten or 11 children.
And the message is,
"These people are special, they're somehow breeding like rabbits,
"and you, the honest, hardworking taxpayer, are paying for them."
I'm sure there's no politicians, no policy makers now
who would ever think in these terms,
who would ever advocate,
as they did in the 1920s and 1930s,
sterilisation for certain groups of people.
Or, you know, to encourage certain people to reproduce and not others.
Well, that's not quite true, of course. Really?
Well, I mean we have just chosen to introduce
a three-child limit in Universal Credit.
You know, more than two children, that is your lot.
You are being irresponsible, and you, your family, your children
will have to accept the financial consequences
of that irresponsibility.
With some exceptions, families whose third child is born
after 6th April 2017 don't receive Universal Credit
for that child, or any more.
We are effectively saying to low-income families,
and that includes low-income families in work,
that we are going to penalise you for the act of having a third child.
And I think that is quite explicitly a message to some parts of society,
"Actually, we think you're having too many children."
The idea that some groups are a burden to society is still with us.
And in recent years, social media has become rife with prejudice.
Here, the eugenic idea that some people aren't fit to breed is back
with a vengeance.
I'm going to Stoney Bridge, just outside of Manchester.
The reason being, I've come to talk to a friend of mine, Steve.
He's done a bit of TV work, advocacy work, etc.
He's got a genetic condition,
and there's a 50/50 chance that he could pass it on to his children
and, most crucial to this story,
has expressed interest in both him and his wife starting a family.
Steve has a genetic condition,
Crouzon syndrome,
which means some of the bones in his skull
fused together too early in infancy.
There are potentially dangerous side effects,
but with modern medical care,
people with the syndrome have a normal life expectancy.
But after Steve and his wife, Vicky, told a newspaper they were thinking
of starting a family, they began to receive online hate messages.
"I think we need to kill these people, right?
"At the very least, imprison them.
"If you heard there was someone out there intentionally inflicting
"people with debilitating diseases,
"would you let them run about and continue to do so,
"or try to put a stop to it?
"How does society feel about forced vasectomies?
"Some cords are just better cut.
"It's either that, or beat this guy over the head with a rock
"and ship him down the river to the '80s cult classic
"that he came from."
And that kind of shocked us more than anything,
because it's not something I've usually come across.
I've come across the bullying comments,
people making childish names,
and abusing me,
but that's a whole new level that I've experienced.
I was upset and, obviously, hearing them say things
like that about my husband, who I love dearly,
obviously is a massive shock.
I'm fully prepared for if I do have a child with Crouzon's.
I was brought up with the situation that you have a condition,
you're not different from anyone else.
And that's the kind of environment I can bring my child up in.
And you can still live a happy life.
He hasn't really thought this through.
I mean, no-one knows the path of Crouzon's better than you.
We both agree that we'd make fantastic parents.
You know, I think if we did have a baby, or children,
you know, they'd all be greatly loved.
I'm really angry right now.
I want to know when did we as a human race decide
when it was OK to say who can and who can't have kids?
And it's made all the more infuriating
by the fact that these are people I know.
This is like a really good mate of mine and his wife,
who wanted to start a family.
It's like a perfectly normal thing,
just subject to such scrutiny and vitriol.
And to make matters worse,
there are also growing fears
around recent medical breakthroughs.
About one in five people in the UK have a form of disability,
and some of them worry that emerging science
might usher in a new era of eugenics.
Sarah Leiter was born with albinism
and is almost completely blind.
She's also a genetic researcher,
and is concerned about the potential misuse of medical advances.
What is the medical landscape like at the moment?
What's been developing a lot over the past few years
has been screening.
So I think the most prominent example people would know
about is Down's syndrome screening in pregnancy.
Today, an estimated 90% of Down's syndrome pregnancies are terminated.
Advocacy groups like the Don't Screen Us Out campaign are concerned
that one day people with Down's syndrome
will be eradicated from society.
And now a new technique is available that could expand screening hugely.
Now we can do non-invasive antenatal genetics
which is basically where you take a blood sample from the mum
and you're basically... Because there's a very small amount of DNA
from the baby is going to be circulating in Mum's blood.
So actually by taking a sample of blood from Mum, we can now
look at, are there certain genetic changes in the baby?
And at the moment this is mostly being done in a targeted approach.
So, like, a family might have one child with cystic fibrosis
which is, you know, a life-limiting condition.
They might say we don't want a second child with cystic fibrosis.
So at the moment, I think it's still very much based
on if you know your family has a condition.
But who knows whether in future
this will just become a much more broad approach,
where you say, actually we screen for every potential genetic mutation
there is and then we like, you know...
Actually, I don't know how many embryos would be left in the end.
You'd actually have to rule out probably
about a tenth of all pregnancies.
Could this mean that in the future there'll be fewer people like me
and these children?
We share the same genetic condition -
Neurofibromatosis Type 1, or NF1.
It's caused by a mutation on a single gene.
This causes benign tumours to appear.
Mine are on my face, but they can form anywhere,
causing many different complications.
You eat pizza as well?
Yep.
Screening can now detect NF1 in embryos,
and couples can choose not to go ahead with pregnancies.
I asked the mum of eight-year-old Ellie what she thinks.
This is, I think, really, really tough.
When you're thinking about it from a eugenics point of view,
you're thinking about what genetic issues
do you not want to carry on populating.
But you're missing out on what potentially
could you have aside from that.
And I think to view a person's life
as a catalogue of medical appointments
really misses out on all the other stuff that matters far more.
Some disabled people fear screening
will ultimately remove them from society,
which is what eugenicists have always wanted.
I'm with the Lichy family.
Mum, Dad and both children are all deaf.
We're getting to the stage now medically
where we can start screening
for things like deafness.
Is that a good idea?
No.
I was really angry when I first heard that they were able
to look at the genes of a baby
or an embryo and then get rid of the deaf genes.
And I thought,
"Do you think that deaf people's lives aren't worth living?
"Does that mean deaf people are lesser than hearing people?"
And I felt very offended by that.
I believe deaf people have a lot of life to live
and a lot to offer and provide to society.
I feel targeted.
Because all that campaigning for human rights, for rights about,
for example, black, white people, gay, straight people,
it just feels like all that campaigning
for all of this equality law
actually doesn't mean anything,
because disabled people are being targeted by this.
Yeah, it feels like two stories, you know?
On one hand we're valued and we should have equality,
and on the other hand,
we shouldn't have existed in the first place.
But is screening always wrong?
Philosophically, it's a minefield.
Complete minefield.
The worlds of Adam Pearson and NF1 are completely
and utterly inseparable.
I've dealt with that and I've got no doubt
my prospective children will be able to deal with it.
But would it be easier if they didn't have to?
Kind of, for me, I wouldn't change it for the world,
because it's made me who I am
and it's given me the platform that I now have.
But, you know, I've had 35 surgeries by 34 years of age.
That's not fun.
Got bullied a lot at school,
and there's the whole thing when you have a facial disfigurement,
you somehow lose your anonymity and become public property.
And it's also not my decision exclusively, either.
You know, when we're talking about kind of raising children,
there's invariably always someone else involved.
I want to meet people who've used screening to avoid passing
on a hereditary condition.
I'm meeting the Chiocci family.
Dad Michael, like me, has NF1.
So, much like me, you have NF1
but it's affected us in very different ways, obviously.
I've got a lot of fibroma on my face and upper body.
How has it affected you?
I've got quite a few like fibromas as well.
So, obviously, I've got the neurofibroma here.
I've got a few. I've got them all down my back.
I just look like I've got a lot of extra nipples all over my body,
generally on my back,
but I think, apart from that, I'm still quite clumsy
and I think Emma will probably tell you
that sometimes my short term memory is not brilliant.
I kind of get quite forgetful at times.
Yeah, very. I'm clumsy as hell.
So, we have that in common.
Their first son Josh was conceived naturally.
He has inherited the NF1 gene.
He's 13 years old now.
And how has NF affected Josh?
He's got moderate learning problems.
He's got...
..a plexi-form neurofibroma under his tongue.
He's got them round his jaws.
He's hyper-mobility.
He's got scoliosis.
Very outgoing.
He doesn't let anything stand in his way.
But I think he's starting to realise now, doesn't he,
that he's a little bit different.
After Josh was born, Emma and Michael heard about
a pioneering new medical technique
called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis,
which involves creating embryos using IVF.
On average, in cases like the Chioccis,
half will carry the NF gene and half won't.
Doctors select the embryos without the faulty gene
and implant them in the mother's womb.
I think with us they re-implanted two,
and that's how we ended up with Oliver.
Nice. Yeah. Show your muscles!
The debate that rages on is,
are we ultimately screening out disability?
How was the response from the NF community?
Well, we did have a few people that said that they didn't agree
with what we were doing,
which I did struggle with for a while.
But I have no regrets.
But do you understand the point they're making? Yeah, I do.
Are we or aren't we screening out disability?
I do. I do understand that.
But why should a child suffer unnecessarily if they don't have to?
And you're not trying to get rid of people who are alive today.
We're just trying to give people, no,
to children who haven't even been born yet,
the best chance for the future,
which is a completely different thing altogether.
No, completely.
I mean, I do wonder sometimes if I've given Michael and Joshua
the idea that maybe I was saying that they weren't good enough,
but I was just doing it to have a healthy child.
I didn't want another child to go through what Joshua's been through.
I think like most parents, all you ever want is what's best
for your children, really.
I don't think there's a right or wrong answer.
I think it's what is best for you.
I don't think what we've done is wrong.
Everyone makes their own decisions.
I think everyone's circumstances are different.
Everyone's had different experiences.
So, currently, this technology
is being used to screen for things like NF and Huntington's.
But the big debate is that the further advanced it becomes,
the more possibilities there are.
And it could stray off into a kind of design your own baby area.
Where do you think the line should be drawn?
I think we've got it right in the UK at the moment.
I mean, when you go for your PGD,
there's not like a shopping list.
Do you want a boy or a girl?
What colour eyes and hair do you want them to have?
It is solely, basically, to make sure that the baby's healthy,
doesn't have the same problem that you have yourself.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me that a family where two members
already have a genetic condition like NF1 would try PGD.
I really liked them, and they've really thought it through.
Ultimately, parents want the best possible life for their kids
which is what any parent wants and it isn't unreasonable.
And I get it.
I would probably make a very similar choice in their situation.
And I understand the objection
that if we start screening out disability, what does that say
about how we value disabled people?
And I don't think that's what happening with PGD.
I think there's a definite line
that's been drawn in the sand.
Where this all starts to become a bit more eugenic
in its practise is when you go from trying to relieve suffering
and slowly creep towards enhancing and altering humans.
Oliver is a living, breathing example
of how modern genetic science can alleviate suffering.
But what if the same kind of technology that helped him
could be used to change children in other ways?
What if you could use IVF to create a number of embryos
and genetically test them for skills or talents?
So, for instance, you could choose the one likely
to be the most intelligent.
Current law prohibits this use for PGD.
But some scientists say it could be technically possible
and that we need to consider it.
When you look at the history of eugenics, intelligence is key.
How do we figure out who are the most intelligent people,
and who are the least intelligent.
But identifying intelligence is so difficult.
Even now, we have IQ testing
but many scientists are not confident
IQ tests really measure intelligence.
Even if we know what intelligence is in all its complexity,
it's such a kind of difficult thing to pin down.
But there are some geneticists out there who believe
that we can not only measure intelligence through tests,
so through written-down tests,
but that if we look inside our DNA,
inside our genomes,
we might be able to isolate intelligence in our genes.
And it's incredibly controversial.
I don't know if the science is even there yet.
I don't think the science is there.
But I certainly want to understand
how it works and how they think it might be possible.
I'm visiting scientists at King's College, London.
They've called publicly for society and government to urgently confront
the possibility that we will, in the future,
be able to screen embryos for intelligence.
Here, and around the world,
scientists have spent years looking
at educational achievement
and trying to find shared patterns in DNA.
So if I were to have my DNA sample and then send it into a company
it would end up something like that. Yes.
They say that occasional variations
in a person's genome, known as their genetic score,
can partly explain how well that person could do
at school and university.
And, in theory, you could do that test before they're even born.
So we now have lots of information from huge samples of people.
So these are called genome-wide association studies.
The most recent study that looked at this found that knowing someone's
genetic score right now, on the information we have right now...
So a baby? Yeah. Yeah.
We could do that, or an adult.
You know, just take a DNA test,
saliva, or blood or whatever.
..it's about as good as knowing,
in terms of predicting how well
they'll do in school,
It's about as good as knowing their parents' income.
So, like, not that good.
But like, you know, obviously people differ a lot
with income brackets in how well they do at school.
Some people do really well, some people don't.
And with this genetic score,
some people do really well and some people don't.
But it's about as good as knowing their parents' income.
This is hotly debated.
Just because two things are associated,
it doesn't mean one is necessarily causing the other.
These genetic markers may not be directly linked to intelligence
but may, for example, be more common in better-off families
who took part in the study,
who can afford a higher standard of education.
Whatever the true relationship,
Stuart and his colleagues argue that they can use DNA
to partly predict educational achievement.
Can you imagine a day when a mother
or father would be able to go to a clinic,
have their foetuses tested,
and pick out the one that they think of as the ideal child?
Yeah.
In future, yeah, I totally think that the technology is possible
to do that, which is why we need to be having this debate.
At the moment, we've made the decision as a society
that we test for rare diseases,
because we don't want kids growing up
with those devastating, rare conditions.
But we need to adjust that debate
and start talking now about other traits, as well,
and which we should be allowing parents to select for.
This information is going to be available
and we need to work out what we're going to do with it.
We're now at the point where we can make predictions,
we can say this person is predicted to be, you know,
in the top end of the educational distribution, for instance.
Or this person is as predicted to do really, really poorly
in an intelligence test.
So really just by studying the DNA, you can make that prediction? Yes.
So when we look at the history of eugenics,
I mean, the entire impetus
behind it was the idea that we could isolate in somebody's body
their innate capacities, their innate abilities.
And from that be able to tell
whether they would be useful to society or not so useful to society.
Do you feel that genetics now is getting towards that?
No.
Because science doesn't tell us anything about whether people
have any kind of innate worth or value.
That's completely outside of the realm of science.
We have to make judgments about that.
My personal view is that everyone has equal worth, no matter
what their intelligence test score.
They're just differences. That's all they are.
And we have to work out ways of dealing with that.
I mean, on the surface of it,
you could say if you could screen out
a very damaging condition, something that might shorten your child's life
or cause them severe disabilities in the future,
then why would you not want to be able to do that?
So to go one step further and say,
"Well, now that we can screen out for these diseases,
"perhaps we can screen out for everyday diseases."
And perhaps after that,
we could screen for the genes that might make you
have a certain eye colour or a certain hair colour,
or a certain level of intelligence.
And why then wouldn't you want to do that, as well?
You know, if you're going one step, why not go all the way?
Logically then, it's hard to fault that,
because we've already started walking down that path.
But it's incredibly fraught.
And I think it's as fraught now as it was 100 years ago.
We haven't really resolved these ethical queries for ourselves.
I've learned so far that today's genetic technologies
are only used to ease suffering.
But as science advances,
it puts current regulations under more and more strain.
And, of course, regulations can be broken.
This is the Francis Crick Institute in London.
I am here to quiz Britain's top geneticist
about a scientific scandal that shocked the world.
It concerns a revolutionary new technique known as gene editing,
and it's raised the spectre of unborn children
being genetically enhanced.
A eugenic dream.
And it was all to do with this man.
In November, 2018, Chinese scientist He Jiankui,
or JK as he refers to himself,
stunned the world when he made an announcement
at a genetics conference in Hong Kong.
First of all, we didn't know when he accepted the invitation
to come and speak to us
any of the work that he's now going to talk about.
Leading British geneticist Robin Lovell-Badge
was one of the conference organisers.
His hero is Bob Edwards, the pioneer of in vitro fertilisation.
He told me that he wanted to emulate this.
He wanted to do something
that would be of benefit to millions of people.
For the last three years, JK had been performing gene editing
experiments in secret on humans.
He was driven by huge ambition and he was very wealthy.
JK recruited seven couples where the man was HIV positive.
He told them he could use gene editing
to make their children immune to the disease.
Gene editing works thanks to something called
CRISPR-Cas9,
a programmable molecular scissor.
This can be programmed to find a specific location
on the DNA molecule and cut it.
Then a new piece of genetic code can be inserted there.
JK tried to use this technique to give embryos something called
a CCR5 Delta 32 mutation.
People born with this can be resistant to HIV.
In late 2018, twin girls were born
who had undergone JK's gene editing.
But it seems although he had made some change
to the baby's genes, it wasn't the ones he'd intended.
He didn't actually make the Delta 32 mutation
which we understand something about.
He made completely random mutations
that we don't know the consequences of the specific
mutations he's making in the gene.
The conference attendees were shocked.
We were just stunned,
because basically what he had done
was completely outside all ethical frameworks that we all stand by.
It's illegal in many countries.
And he was completely unregulated and we've learnt
since that the ethics process that he claimed to have gone
through wasn't real, it was fake.
And the consent process that the families apparently engaged
with was also not real and true, so it was fraudulent.
After the huge international outcry against his work,
JK is reported to be under house arrest in China.
So where does all this leave us with the hype over designer babies?
At present, scientists have had some limited success
editing genes in mice.
How successful?
Well, that's the problem. At the moment, it's not efficient enough.
So when we're doing experiments in mice,
occasionally, it works really well.
We get maybe 90%, 95%, sometimes 100% of the mice born
carrying the particular genetic alteration we wanted.
But often, it's not that efficient.
It's down to about 20% or so.
So that's not good enough.
If we really want to use these techniques,
we have to know that they're going to work.
Preferably in all the embryos,
and certainly in all the cells within each embryo.
These techniques will improve,
but will they ever be used to make a baby stronger or cleverer?
Traits like these are the result of your upbringing,
environment and hundreds of genes working in tandem.
So the idea that designer babies are just around the corner
is pure science fiction.
You know, it's hard enough altering one gene
and making sure that there are no problems,
that you've done exactly the alteration you want.
If you start saying, "I want to alter five genes,"
all the complications multiply each time, so you increase the number.
It's possible, but it gets harder and harder.
And if you're talking about 20, 50 or 100 genes, forget it.
It's just not possible.
There's a big difference between me and the missus
coming to you and saying,
"Hey, we want to correct for the NF gene,"
and coming to you and saying,
"Hey, don't make it ginger, quite smart,
"not too smart, and don't have it like Chelsea."
That's a whole different...
Completely impossible to do the latter.
We would hope to be able to do the former,
but we could not possibly do the latter.
Gene editing has enormous potential.
One day, it will help cure cancers and other diseases.
And, of course, it's impractical to monitor
every scientist in every corner of the world,
so abuses are still possible.
But I wanted to know how we in the UK
are preparing for future scientific breakthroughs.
So I've come to meet one of the country's
leading genetic scientists.
Ewan Birney, director of Genomics England,
was part of the team that sequenced the human genome.
The first thing to emphasise is that there were many questions
which don't get answered by scientists here.
So there are many questions where scientists gives us,
science gives us new options and tools and things that we could do.
But we have to have a process to decide, societally,
what is acceptable or not.
And so we need a forum which isn't science-led,
where science informs but the decision is made by society.
Now, in the UK, for many of these decisions
the Human Fertilisation and Embryo Authority
is a very good model for this.
It's one of the best in the world.
Where they have some legislative
framework that's set up by parliament
and then they have a set of non-scientists thinking very hard
and taking evidence from many different groups
to make a decision about what's allowable and what's not allowable.
So you understand the mistrust because of past mistakes?
I think so and I think a real mistake is to pretend
the history isn't there,
because some of the leading lights who founded genetics
were also strong proponents of eugenics.
So it's part of our history that we have to understand and own,
and we have to be cognisant
that people can make these arguments again.
And then we need to understand and be able to rebut them,
both scientifically, but also engage with people in society
to show that we understand what we're doing
and how our tools can be used.
Eugenics is a chilling lesson from history.
At its heart is the belief that who we can be
and what we're capable of is decided on the day we're born.
And as a science journalist,
what's particularly disturbing for me
is to see how this aspect of eugenics has survived.
Some people still believe
that there are substantial innate differences
between classes and races.
As political tensions rise around the world,
it's crucial that we understand properly where the small differences
we see between us actually come from.
I've come to Oxford to hear the results of a giant research project
to answer precisely this question.
It was led by Oxford University and John Radcliffe Hospital.
The Intergrowth-21st project is a population-based study.
It's an international study
which has been carried out
in eight different countries across the world.
Each site had 600 mothers who were pregnant.
The baby's physical growth and neurological development
were measured in the womb at birth and through their early lives.
What we're doing at the moment
is a snapshot at the time of their second birthday.
What we would expect normally-developing children
to look like from a neural development point of view
at the time of their second birthday.
Mothers were chosen who were well-nourished, healthy,
living in a good environment and with good medical care.
The aim was to see how children develop
if they're given an equal start in life.
Professor Stephen Kennedy says the results were clear.
When you study healthy women around the world,
their babies grow in a similar way inside the womb.
They achieve a similar size at birth.
And they continue to grow in a similar way
up until two years of age.
They've hit the same, similar milestones.
Irrespective of the colour of their skin,
irrespective of race,
ethnicity, any of these terms,
or where they're living.
We found that the differences between countries was less than 10%.
And if their environments are decent and good enough,
we'll show that the foetuses and the children
in all these different countries
could achieve the very same potential.
No-one is saying that genes do not contribute something
to human growth and brain development.
No-one is saying that.
All one is saying is that nurture
is far, far more important than nature.
Get nurture right,
people will thrive,
will grow, as they should do, to their full potential.
What's surprising to me is that Professor Kennedy
says his team's work has ruffled feathers.
It's generally believed
that there's an association
between a mother's skin colour
and how well children grow inside the womb.
Really? Where is it generally believed that this is the case?
In the scientific community, and certainly in the lay community.
That's quite shocking.
They visit rural India and they see that the children are stunted.
They don't ask themselves the question,
"Why are these kids stunted?"
It's got nothing to do with the mother's genetic inheritance.
It's got everything to do with the fact that the mother may be malnourished,
just as her parents and her grandparents were.
So, you think there are still people within the scientific community,
the mainstream scientific community,
who do cling to these ideas that populations are different
and there are some kind of fundamental differences
between people of different class or different race? Absolutely.
It is... This is the belief out there.
What your study really shows is that that's not the case.
We are pretty much all the same.
We are all the same. We are one species, Homo sapiens.
So the public health message is massive.
If you wish to improve overall human capital in your country...
..invest in women.
Eugenics began with scientists claiming
that certain groups of people are superior
because of what they inherit.
Our story ends with the opposite conclusion -
as a species, human DNA is unusually similar.
What makes us different is much more than our genes.
For more than 100 years,
a lot of us have been fed this message that we are who we are.
We're born a certain way, and that is all...
That contains all the potential for that human being.
That this baby's fate is decided on the day that they're born.
I know the effects of racial stereotypes. I've heard them myself,
living as a person of Indian origin in Britain.
I am British, but I'm not always treated as the same as white British people.
I think it'll take a long time, um...
..for us to move away from that and have a more nuanced
and balanced understanding of what it means to be human.
Making these films, I've heard some amazing stories
and met some amazing people.
People I won't forget.
People who were written off by society.
People who were deemed to be lesser.
People who proved everyone wrong.
If delving into eugenics has taught me anything,
it's about humanity.
It's about how to root for the underdog.
I'm the ultimate underdog, how can I not root for them?
And at some point, we're all going to be touched by
at least the principles of eugenics.
We're all going to get turned down for something,
get knocked back because we're not deemed useful enough,
or desirable enough in a particular area.
And it's a case of, how do we respond to that?
How far do we go to attain this false narrative of...of perfection?