Author: Bernard Amador Publisher: Bernard Amador ISBN: 1434854078 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
In her search for Hans Barskova, a Teaching Assistant at MIT, Eliza Boria learns that the neural code was deciphered by the United States government and the technology to create computer-controlled humans ("Cybernatons") was tested in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Eliza discovers her grandmother, Bernice Figueroa, traveled to Russia with Norbert Weiner during his lectures on cybernetics and planted the idea of utilizing cybernetics for the advancement of eugenics to create a master race on earth. The Soviets were part of a greater design and exploited as a prototype in the race for global control. Eliza becomes victim of the political and scientific communities who want to prevent the key mechanism of the mind from being revealed. Eliza must help the American government preserve the conspiracy and convince the world that the neural code cannot be deciphered. Eliza reveals the technology to the modern day eugenics leaders in an attempt to put a stop to their diabolical plans.
Author: Daniel J. Kevles Publisher: Knopf ISBN: 0307831507 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 698
Book Description
Daniel Kevles traces the study and practice of eugenics--the science of "improving" the human species by exploiting theories of heredity--from its inception in the late nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation within the field of genetic engineering. It is rich in narrative, anecdote, attention to human detail, and stories of competition among scientists who have dominated the field.
Author: Paul A. Lombardo Publisher: Indiana University Press ISBN: 0253222699 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
This volume assesses the history of eugenics in the United States and its status in the age of the Human Genome Project. The essays explore the early support of compulsory sterilization by doctors and legislators.
Author: Stefan Kuhl Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195348788 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 185
Book Description
When Hitler published Mein Kampf in 1924, he held up a foreign law as a model for his program of racial purification: The U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which prohibited the immigration of those with hereditary illnesses and entire ethnic groups. When the Nazis took power in 1933, they installed a program of eugenics--the attempted "improvement" of the population through forced sterilization and marriage controls--that consciously drew on the U.S. example. By then, many American states had long had compulsory sterilization laws for "defectives," upheld by the Supreme Court in 1927. Small wonder that the Nazi laws led one eugenics activist in Virginia to complain, "The Germans are beating us at our own game." In The Nazi Connection, Stefan Kühl uncovers the ties between the American eugenics movement and the Nazi program of racial hygiene, showing that many American scientists actively supported Hitler's policies. After introducing us to the recently resurgent problem of scientific racism, Kühl carefully recounts the history of the eugenics movement, both in the United States and internationally, demonstrating how widely the idea of sterilization as a genetic control had become accepted by the early twentieth century. From the first, the American eugenicists led the way with radical ideas. Their influence led to sterilization laws in dozens of states--laws which were studied, and praised, by the German racial hygienists. With the rise of Hitler, the Germans enacted compulsory sterilization laws partly based on the U.S. experience, and American eugenists took pride in their influence on Nazi policies. Kühl recreates astonishing scenes of American eugenicists travelling to Germany to study the new laws, publishing scholarly articles lionizing the Nazi eugenics program, and proudly comparing personal notes from Hitler thanking them for their books. Even after the outbreak of war, he writes, the American eugenicists frowned upon Hitler's totalitarian government, but not his sterilization laws. So deep was the failure to recognize the connection between eugenics and Hitler's genocidal policies, that a prominent liberal Jewish eugenicist who had been forced to flee Germany found it fit to grumble that the Nazis "took over our entire plan of eugenic measures." By 1945, when the murderous nature of the Nazi government was made perfectly clear, the American eugenicists sought to downplay the close connections between themselves and the German program. Some of them, in fact, had sought to distance themselves from Hitler even before the war. But Stefan Kühl's deeply documented book provides a devastating indictment of the influence--and aid--provided by American scientists for the most comprehensive attempt to enforce racial purity in world history.
Author: Ruth Clifford Engs Publisher: Greenwood ISBN: Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
Eugenics--the theory that we can improve future generations of humans through selective breeding--was one of the most controversial movements of the early 20th century. This encyclopedia brings into one place concise descriptions of the leading figures, organizations, events, legislation, publications, concepts, and terms of this vitally important period historical movement.
Author: Randall Hansen Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 110703292X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 313
Book Description
This book shows how eugenic sterilization policies were maintained after the 1940s in the United States and Canada despite the discrediting of such theories by comparable Nazi Germany policies. It focuses on the individual experience of victims of sterilization, the doctors concerned, and the mental health institutions that protected the system.
Author: Alexandra Minna Stern Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520285069 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 422
Book Description
"With an emphasis on the American West, Eugenic Nation explores the long and unsettled history of eugenics in the United States. This expanded second edition includes shocking details that demonstrate that the story is far from over. Alexandra Minna Stern explores the unauthorized sterilization of female inmates in California state prisons and ongoing reparations for North Carolina victims of sterilization, as well as the topics of race-based intelligence tests, school segregation, the U.S. Border Patrol, tropical medicine, the environmental movement, and opposition to better breeding. Radically new and relevant, this edition draws from recently uncovered historical records to demonstrate patterns of racial bias in California's sterilization program and to recover personal experiences of reproductive injustice. Stern connects the eugenic past to the genomic present with attention to the ethical and social implications of emerging genetic technologies"--Provided by publisher.
Author: Philippa Levine Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199385920 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 167
Book Description
In 1883, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the word "eugenics" to express his dream of perfecting the human race by applying the laws of genetic heredity. Adapting Darwin's theory of evolution to human society, eugenics soon became a powerful, international movement, committed to using the principles of heredity and statistics to encourage healthy and discourage unhealthy reproduction. Early in the twentieth century and across the world, doctors, social reformers, and politicians turned to the new science of eugenics as a means to improve and strengthen their populations. Eugenics advocates claimed their methods would result in healthier, fitter babies and would dramatically limit human suffering. The reality was a different story. In the name of scientific progress and of human improvement, eugenicists targeted the weak and the sick, triggering coercive legislation on issues as disparate as race, gender, immigration, euthanasia, abortion, sterilization, intelligence, mental illness, and disease control. Nationalists eagerly embraced eugenics as a means to legitimize their countries' superiority and racialized assumptions, and the Nazis notoriously used eugenics to shape their "final solution." In this lucid volume, Philippa Levine tackles the intricate and controversial history of eugenics, masterfully synthesizing the enormous range of policies and experiments carried out in the name of eugenics around the world throughout the twentieth century. She questions the widespread belief that eugenics disappeared after World War II and evaluates the impact of eugenics on current reproductive and genetic sciences. Charting the development of such controversial practices as artificial insemination, sperm donation, and population control, this book offers a powerful, extraordinarily timely reflection on the frequent interplay between genetics and ethics. Eugenics may no longer be a household word, but we feel its effects even today.
Author: John Glad Publisher: Future Human Evolution ISBN: 1557791546 Category : Eugenics Languages : en Pages : 182
Book Description
Evolutionary selection has been radically relaxed in the human species as a result of the development of civilization, science in general, and medicine in particular. While these advances have hugely benefited current populations, they have to a significant degree released the species from the biological process which created it and maintains its viability. Formerly, natural selection took place largely as a result of differential mortality, but now that most people survive well beyond their child bearing years, selection is determined largely by differential fertility. Aside from genetic illnesses, this new selection is also characterized by a negative correlation between fertility and intelligencethe core of eugenic concern for over a century. Eugenics views itself as the fourth leg of the chair of civilization, the other three being a) a thrifty expenditure of natural resources, b) mitigation of environmental pollution, and c) maintenance of a human population not exceeding the planets carrying capacity. Eugenics, which can be thought of as human ecology, is thus part and parcel of the environmental movement. Humanity is defined, not as the totality of the currently living population, but as the number of people who will potentially ever live. This is a book about the struggle for human rights and parental responsibility.
Author: Bernard Amador
Author: Daniel J. Kevles
Author: Paul A. Lombardo
Author: Stefan Kuhl
Author: Ruth Clifford Engs
Author: Randall Hansen
Author: James Alfred Field
Author: Alexandra Minna Stern
Author: Philippa Levine
Author: John Glad