Improvement of the human race

1. Genetics is everywhere these days – and it will continue as a dominant force in
biology and society for decades to come.
BY-
Dr. Dinesh C. Sharma
KM Govt. Girls P.G. College, Badalpur, GB Nagar
Eugenics, Euthenics
&
Euphenics

2. Dangerously Ahead of the
Game - A Eugenics Exhibit
at the 1920 Kansas State
Fair
Eugenics,
Improvement of human race
through heredity law or using
Pedigree analysis.
Eugenics is the science of
improving the human species by
selectively mating people with
specific desirable hereditary
traits. It aims to reduce human
suffering by “breeding out”
disease, disabilities and so-
called undesirable
characteristics from the human
population

3. Eugenics is the science of improving the
human species by selectively mating people
with specific desirable hereditary traits.
It aims to reduce human suffering by
“breeding out” disease, disabilities and so-
called undesirable characteristics from the
human population.
Early supporters of eugenics believed people
inherited mental illness, criminal tendencies
and even poverty, and that these conditions
could be bred out of the gene pool.

4. In 1883, Sir Francis Galton (British scholar and
cousin of Charles Darwin), first used the term
eugenics, meaning “well-born.”
Galton believed that the human race could help
direct its future by selectively breeding individuals
who have “desired” traits. This idea was based on
Galton’s study of upper class Britain. Following
these studies, Galton concluded that an elite
position in society was due to a good genetic
makeup. While Galton’s plans to improve the
human race through selective breeding never came
to fruition in Britain, they eventually took sinister
turns in other countries.

5. Eugenicists in the U.S. focused on efforts to stop the
transmission of negative or “undesirable” traits from generation
to generation. This lead to the 1911 establishment of The
Eugenics Records Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, New
York. The ERO spent time tracking family histories and concluded
that people deemed to be unfit more often came from families that
were poor, low in social standing, immigrant, and/or minority.
Further, ERO researchers “demonstrated” that the undesirable
traits in these families, such as pauperism, were due to genetics,
and not lack of resources.
Committees were convened to offer solutions to the problem of
the growing number of “undesirables” in the U.S. population.
Stricter immigration rules were enacted, but the most ominous
resolution was a plan to sterilize “unfit” individuals to
prevent them from passing on their negative traits. During the
20th century, a total of 33 states had sterilization programs in
place.

6. Nazi eugenics, were Nazi Germany's racially
based social policies that placed the biological
improvement of the Aryan race or Germanic
"Übermenschen" master race through eugenics at the
center of Nazi ideology.
More than 400,000 people were sterilized against their
will, while up to 300,000 were killed under Action T4,
a euthanasia program. In June 1935, Hitler and his
cabinet made a list of seven new decrees, number 5 was
to speed up the investigations of sterilization
In Germany, eugenics were mostly known under the
synonymous term racial hygiene. Following the Second
World War, both terms effectively vanished and were
replaced by Humangenetik (human genetics).

7. Hitler's views on eugenics
Adolf Hitler read about racial hygiene during his imprisonment
in Landsberg Prison. He believed the nation had become weak,
corrupted by dysgenics, the infusion of degenerate elements into its
bloodstream.
The racialism and idea of competition, termed social Darwinism in
1944, were discussed by European scientists and also in the Vienna
press during the 1920s. Where Hitler picked up the ideas is uncertain.
He endorsed what he perceived to be an early eugenics treatment of
deformed children:
Sparta (using ideas perhaps borrowed from Ernst Haeckel), The
exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their
destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more
humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most
pathological subject, and indeed at any price, and yet takes the life of a
hundred thousand healthy children in consequence of birth control or
through abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of degenerates
burdened with illnesses.

8. Nazi eugenics program
The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring,
enacted on July 14, 1933, allowed the compulsory sterilisation of
any citizen who according to the opinion of a "Genetic Health
Court" suffered from a list of alleged genetic disorders and
required physicians to register every case of hereditary illness
known to them, except in women over 45 years of age. Physicians
could be fined for failing to comply.
In 1934, the first year of the Law's operation, nearly 4,000 people
appealed against the decisions of sterilization authorities. A total of
3,559 of the appeals failed.
By the end of the Nazi regime, over 200 Hereditary Health
Courts (Erbgesundheitsgerichte) were created, and under their
rulings over 400,000 persons were sterilized against their will.

9. Nazi eugenics institutions
The Hadamar Clinic was a mental hospital in the German
used by the Nazi-controlled German government as the
site of Action T4.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human
Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927. Hartheim
Euthanasia Centre was also part of the euthanasia
programme where the Nazis killed individuals they
deemed disabled. The first method used involved
transporting patients by buses in which the engine exhaust
gases were passed into the interior of the buses, and so
killed the passengers. Gas chambers were developed later
and used pure carbon monoxide gas to kill the patients. In
its early years, and during the Nazi era, the Clinic was
strongly associated with theories of eugenics and racial
hygiene advocated by its leading theorists Fritz
Lenz and Eugen Fischer, and by its director Otmar von
Verschuer. Under Fischer, the sterilization of so-
called Rhineland Bastards was undertaken. Grafeneck
Castle was one of Nazi Germany's killing centers, and
today it is a memorial place dedicated to the victims of the
Action T4.

10. Nazi eugenics policies regarding marriage
After the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, it became
compulsory for both marriage partners to be tested for hereditary
diseases in order to preserve the perceived racial purity of the
Aryan race.
Everyone was encouraged to carefully evaluate his or her
prospective marriage partner eugenically during courtship.
Members of the SS were cautioned to carefully interview
prospective marriage partners to make sure they had no family
history of hereditary disease or insanity, but to do this carefully
so as not to hurt the feelings of the prospective fiancee and, if it
became necessary to reject her for eugenic reasons, to do it
tactfully and not cause her any offense.

11. Positive eugenics refers to efforts aimed at increasing desirable
traits, while negative eugenics refers to efforts aimed at
decreasing undesirable traits.
Breeding for 'desirable' traits to improve the human race,
called positive eugenics. This focused on giving monetary
incentives in the form of tax breaks and stipends to encourage the
'best' to reproduce and pass on their traits. These were designed to
motivate those with desirable traits to have more children and
therefore increase the number of individuals with such traits in the
human population
In Negative eugenics, 'unfit' people are prevented from reproducing,
often against their will. Negative eugenics involved sterilization,
marriage restrictions, and in extreme cases euthanasia. Preventing such
people from reproducing prevented their genes from 'tainting' the gene
pool and bringing down the human race.

12. Euthenics:
Euthenics is the study of the improvement of
human functioning and well-being by
improvement of living conditions. (Environment)
Affecting the "improvement" through altering
external factors such as education and the
controllable environment, including the
prevention and removal of contagious
disease and parasites, environmentalism,
education regarding employment, home
economics, sanitation, and housing.

13. Euthenics vs. eugenics
Eugenics Euthenics
Deals with race
improvement through
heredity
deals with race improvement
through environment.
Eugenics is hygiene for the
future generations
Euthenics is hygiene for the
present generation.
Eugenics must await careful
investigation.
Euthenics has immediate
opportunity.
Genetic laws Best enviornment
Euthenics precedes eugenics, developing better men now, and
thus inevitably creating a better race of men in the future.
Euthenics is the term proposed for the preliminary science on
which Eugenics must be based.

14. Euphenics
Euphenics, which literally means
"good appearance" or "normal
appearing", is the science of
making phenotypic improvements
to humans after birth, generally to
affect a problematic genetic
condition.
Euphenics deals with improvement of human race by genetic engineering.

15. Euphenics
Joshua Lederberg (1960) invented the term euphenics to
differentiate the practice from eugenics, which was widely
unpopular at the time. He emphasized that the genetic
manipulation he described was intended to work on phenotype
rather than genotype; he felt it was more feasible to positively
change an individual's genetics rather than attempt to change
the course of evolution as eugenics proposed.
Theodosius Dobzhansky, an outspoken proponent of
euphenics, argued that by improving genetic conditions so that
people could live normal, healthy lives, people could lessen
the impact of genetic conditions, thus lowering future interest
in eugenics or other kinds of genetic manipulation.
Euphenics deals with improvement of human race by genetic engineering.

16. Euphenics
One of the first publicized applications of euphenics was
the use of vitamins containing folic acid during
pregnancy to combat neural-tube deficiencies such
as spina bifida in the 1970s.
However, medical science had been using euphenic
strategies years before the term itself was coined.
Euphenics is used today in the medical community to
more generally refer to methods of affecting a genetic
condition in a positive manner through diet, lifestyle or
environment, such as the use of insulin to control diabetes
or installation of a pacemaker to offset a heart defect.
Euphenics deals with improvement of human race by genetic engineering.