Word: hitlers
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Everyone's favorite law school professor says he would defend Hitler and win. First O.J., now the Third Reich...
Important as it was, the job would take some time. Unlike the atom bomb or the space race, there was no Hitler or Khrushchev who threatened to get there first. Without such external dangers forcing them to pull out all the stops, federally funded genome-project scientists figured they could move at their own pace; they would finish up in 2005 or thereabouts...
Huxley's scenario made sense back in 1932. Some American states were forcibly sterilizing the "feebleminded," and Hitler had praised these policies in Mein Kampf. But the biotech revolution that Huxley dimly foresaw has turned the logic of eugenics inside out. It lets parents choose genetic traits, whether by selective abortion, selective reimplanting of eggs fertilized in vitro or--in perhaps just a few years--injecting genes into fertilized eggs. In Huxley's day eugenics happened only by government mandate; now it will take government mandate--a ban on genetic tinkering--to prevent...
Nowhere, of course, were eugenic theories more enthusiastically codified into binding state doctrine than in Nazi Germany. In 1933 Adolf Hitler's government adopted the Eugenic Sterilization Law. Formulated by the Reich Ministry of the Interior, this edict ordered the compulsory sterilization of all German citizens--not simply those in custody or institutions--who displayed symptoms of a number of presumptively hereditary afflictions, including blindness, schizophrenia and offensive physical deformities. Government officials countered potential objections about the cruelty of this measure by asserting that personal sacrifices would serve the common weal. "We go beyond neighborly love," said one. "We extend...
Eugenics never recovered from the news of what had been carried out under its banner in Hitler's Germany. In truth, a number of people--including G.K. Chesterton, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann and Clarence Darrow--had ridiculed and debunked eugenic theories well before the horrors of the Holocaust occurred and became widely known...