8mm
Posted on 09/09/2007 8:38:36 AM PDT by wagglebee
With the world on the precipice of a genetics revolution, the Holocaust Museum Houston is about to shine a spotlight on one of the lesser-known architects of Nazi Germany's attempt to create a master race: doctors.
In a new exhibit and lecture series, "Medical Ethics and the Holocaust," the museum tells the story of physicians' enthusiastic participation in the murder of their own patients, then explores whether science's powerful new tools could lead to a new eugenics movement.
"It's a warning shot across the bow," Dr. Sheldon Rubenfeld, a Houston endocrinologist and the program's creator, said. "There'll always be a push for individuals, nations or races to dominate others — coming genetic capabilities will give them that potential more than ever before."
The lecture series kicks off tonight with a talk by James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist whose 1953 co-discovery of DNA's structure culminated this decade in the mapping of the human genome. The achievement is expected to revolutionize medicine, but it also brings apprehension because it could lead to designing babies with certain traits and aborting those with others.
The potential scenarios conjure up images of eugenics, the social philosophy, supported by many intellectual leaders in the early 20th century, that advocates the creation of healthier, more intelligent people. Under Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany took the idea to its extreme conclusion.
Watson heads an impressive roster of speakers, who include three Nobel laureates and such prominent figures as Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, and Leon Kass, the former director of President Bush's Council on Bioethics. Topics range from pre-implantation genetic diagnosis to euthanasia in the movies to performance-enhancing drugs in sports to the United States' history with eugenics.
The exhibit, "How Healing Becomes Killing," focuses on Germany's 1939-1945 euthanasia program — the "mercy deaths" that aimed to purge the country of its mentally and physically ill population.
Artifacts exhibited include patient prosthetics excavated from one of the killing centers; patient charts; a package of Luminal, one of the drugs doctors used to kill children born with disease or deformities; and one of the forms physicians signed to authorize the killing of institutionalized patients.
Josef Mengele, dubbed the "Angel of Death" for experiments carried out on prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp, may be the most well-known Nazi physician. He evaded capture for 34 years before dying in Brazil in 1979 following a stroke.
But the exhibit makes clear that such medical abuses and atrocities were widespread throughout the Third Reich. Included in the exhibit is film footage of the trial of three doctors who participated in the killing. All defended their actions as therapeutic.
"They thought they were healing the nation, ridding it of what was known at the time as 'life not worth living,' " said Cheyenne Martin, a bioethicist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and a member of the program's planning committee. "It was a horrific, unprecedented role by a medical community. They weren't forced into their roles. They were leaders."
Few physicians were punished for their roles. Among the most unsettling stories told by the exhibit involves Dr. Heinrich Gross, an Austrian neurologist involved in the killing of physically and mentally handicapped children. Gross went on to conduct and publish research on the brains of those children for which he was awarded Austria's Honorary Cross for Science and Art in 1975. He was stripped of the award in 2003.
The Nazi doctors' role in the Holocaust often is considered to have led to the modern bioethics movement, given the code that came out of Nuremberg that the voluntary consent of human subjects is essential to medical research. But bioethicists argue it took a long time for it to be widely implemented. The Tuskegee experiment, in which researchers studying how syphilis spread and killed black men who were denied treatment, continued until 1972.
The exhibit also depicts the United States' eugenics experience, the neutering of 40,000 people classified as insane or feebleminded in the first half of the century.
The 15-part lecture series concludes Jan. 22, with Methodist Hospital heart surgeon Dr. George Noon discussing the life-saving surgery he performed last year on 97-year-old Dr. Michael DeBakey.
There is a not-yet-determined fee for that lecture, but the others are free. Those who wish to attend must register in advance at the museum's Web site (www.hmh.org/medethics). Most lectures are at the museum Tuesdays at 6 p.m., but tonight's is at 7 at the University of Houston's Cullen Performance Hall.
Oh, I know it will never legitimately be discovered, as it’s nonexistent —however, I’m sure they’ll try to put SOMEthing out as a “gay gene.”
You have any links to Leon Kass discussing Birth Control? I’d love to read what he has to say.
Good reading about some of the M.D.s and PhDs of The Third Reich:
MASTER PLAN, THE: HIMMLER’S SCHOLARS AND THE HOLOCAUST
by Heather Pringle
"Thanks to technology, a woman could declare herself free from the teleological meaning of her sexuality—as free as a man appears to be from his. Her menstrual cycle, since puberty a regular reminder of her natural maternal destiny, is now anovulatory and directed instead by her will and her medications, serving goals only of pleasure and convenience, enjoyable without apparent risk to personal health and safety." – Leon Kass, The End of Courtship
The goal of a master race is still with us, only now it is at a different front. Eugenics before birth.
We really don’t as a culture remember what happened. I was a bit unique in that every year in high school, we were made to watch “Night and Fog”, and had a WWII vet come in and talk about the camps. But many of those who were there are now gone, and the next generation has no idea of history.
The Holocaust is about to be repeated, because the world has forgotten it.
This wouldn't necessarily "make" the child grow up gay, but it could possibly give him a tendency to certain disorders. It seems to work that way with sheep, anyway --- like rams that wanna rut with other rams (I'm serious.)
So it's possible that an abnormal hormone balance could be detected, say in mid-pregnanc,) and the mother could correct it by (theoretically) wearing a hormone patch that normalizes the proportions of testosterone or androgens or whatever.
And the same pre-natal diagnostics might motivate an abortion-minded mother to just kill the baby.
This is all hypothetical at this point. But it's strange: the gays may find that their only real friends are the social conservatives. The only ones who can be trusted not to kill them outright before they're born.
His argument is posed against a very basic kind of ethical violation: the pathologizing of healthy systems and functions, altering or attacking them with drugs, devices, and surgery as if they were diseased. That's contraception's main project: pathologizing normal sexuality.
I am delighted that he considers hummanness and particularly human wholeness as a value in itself. He defends female sexual wholeness. There are so few who do.
But Kass doesn’t say birth control was one of the causes of Nazism.
The Left will sidestep the issue by making the test itself a hate crime. No research outfit will want to have anything to do with creating a "gayness" test. Labs attempting to process "gay gene" tests will be firebombed by gay activists
The elitist humans prefer to abort, contracept, and gay themselves to extinction, leaving the icky breeding for us untermenschen.
Ardently supported, in fact, by Margaret Sanger -- a liberal favorite who founded Planned Parenthood.
Really? I never heard about that. If you have any links please post them. Every time I think that I have seen the bottom, it just drops lower.
In essence, I agree. However...
This has for years been a controversial subject, and it is important to note that homosexuality as we know it most often manifests itself as a BEHAVIOR... Behavior can be programmed by genes (we call it instinct), but as everyone who’s ever made a decision they weren’t happy with knows: as humans we can choose to control our behavior.
There are plenty of recessive genes that are alive and well today. Blonde hair and blue eyes are both recessive traits, but they show no signs of going away. Five fingers is a recessive trait.. Polydactyly, the possession of six fingers on each hand, is dominant and yet also considered a disorder.
The thing is, to acquire a recessive trait one of your parents has to have it, even if the trait is not manifested in them. A trait that discourages reproduction, as you stated, would not go far. However...
Research, aimed at determining whether or not homosexuality is genetic, has identified that the hypothalamus of gay men often has more female components than their straight counterparts. The hypothalamus is responsible for releasing or triggering a number of hormones, including those associated with sexual development and behavior.
The fact that homosexuality tends to run in families (potential molestation not taken into account), as well as in other species, is what has led many to look for a “gay gene.” In fact, what the evidence more likely suggests is that homosexuality is a birth defect of sorts where the hypothalamus doesn’t quite develop properly.
Male fantasies aside, this imbalance is more readily evident in lesbians than it is in gay men... If I suggested a lesbian to you the image of a big, burly woman wearing flannel would not be far behind.
To that extent, the “gay gene” is real. Almost everybody’s met someone who insisted they were straight but you knew damn well they weren’t just from their mannerisms and attributes. Often these people end up ruining their lives, and those of their loved ones, by tricking someone into a sham marriage in the hopes of being ‘normal.’ These people’s spouses almost always “should have seen the warning signs.” Congresscritters Craig and Foley were suspected by some for years of being homosexual despite showing no overt signs.
There are ethical quandries... Should homosexuality be treated as a birth defect? Even if it is, should that require homosexuals to be treated differently? How does that reflect on “born” homosexuals versus men and women who chose (for whatever reason, molestation or convenience) to be gay?
Some have hypothesized that diet, or pollution, or even chemicals in certain makeups, are responsible for the changing speed of sexual development in American children, which is in turn directed by the pituitary gland hanging off the (you guessed it) hypothalamus. Could similar elements be responsible for the continuation of homosexuality, by interfering with proper development of the hypothalamus?
And, most importantly, why did I feel the need to type any of this? Maybe someone can get a free 500 word essay out of it.
They will ALWAYS support Abortion. Their god demands infant sacrifice. I am serious.
http://www.aegis.com/NEWS/AFP/2002/AF020776.html
LONDON, July 8 (AFP) - French prosecutors will appeal the shock dismissal of a case against 30 doctors and officials implicated in the distribution of HIV-tainted blood products in the mid-1980s, Justice Minister Dominique Perben announced here Monday.
Perben, in London on a working visit, told reporters that prosecutors had decided to take the case to the Cour de Cassation, the country’s highest appeals court, to contest last week’s ruling.
Nearly 4,000 people, 1,300 of them hemophiliacs, contracted HIV or full-blown AIDS from contaminated blood they received in transfusions in the mid-1980s. Hundreds have since died.
On Thursday, a Paris court threw out the case against 30 people placed under investigation in connection with the scandal, saying they had not committed any crime.
If the controversial decision is upheld, it will bring an end to more than 10 years of legal action linked to the case.
The French minister said he would meet on Tuesday with victims and relatives of those who died after receiving tainted blood transfusions to explain the prosecutors’ decision.
“I’ll tell them how much I understand the families’ emotional reaction to this decision, and especially to the way it was made public,” he said.
In Paris, some 30 victims and family members protested the ruling outside the French capital’s main court complex, chanting “No to the right to kill with impunity” and “justice tainted, victims scorned”.
Henri Aloncle, 76, whose daughter died of AIDS-related illnesses after receiving a contaminated transfusion, tore up his voter registration card in anger.
“She was contaminated in 1984 and we only learned she had AIDS 11 days before her death. And no one lifted a finger,” he explained.
Ludovic Bouchet, a 26-year-old hemophiliac who contracted HIV when he was 10, said: “Fourteen years of work so this case is not forgotten, and from one day to the next, they grant an amnesty, like for parking tickets.”
Henriette Lecombe, 49, clutched a box containing some of her dead son Xavier’s ashes as she marched in front of the Palais de Justice, explaining that her two sons, both hemophiliacs, had received tainted blood products.
“The court decision prompted me to come here today, in memory of all the victims,” said Lecombe, whose older son Pascal is HIV-positive.
Several senior civil servants, including the head of the country’s blood transfusion service, were jailed or fined in 1993 for knowingly allowing tainted blood products to be used in transfusions.
In 1999, former Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius and former social affairs minister Georgina Dufoix were cleared of being accessories to poisoning.
Former health minister Edmond Herve was convicted of negligence for his role in the scandal, but was not given a punishment.
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Bayer and 3 other medical Corporation also did something like this, not for Eugenics, but for profit:
http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/0503/22.php
An examination of internal Bayer company documents by The New York Times reveals that the company was engaged in unsavory, probably criminal marketing practices. The documents reveal that Bayer continued to sell contaminated blood plasma causing thousands of hemophiliac patients to be infected with AIDS. The company continued to sell the contaminated blood in Asia for over a year when it had already introduced a safer, heated blood plasma version in the US and Europe in February 1984.
The documents examined by the Times provide evidence of unrestrained corrupt practices by a pharmaceutical industry giant. According to The Times, records suggest that the reason for continuing to sell an AIDS infected blood product, was to get rid of inventory and “the company hoped to preserve the profit margin from ‘several large fixed-price contracts.’”
This previously uninvestigated case demonstrates how this industry’s lies and crimes are shielded by officials at the Food and Drug Administration. The Times reports that in 1985 FDA’s Dr. Harry Meyer willingly helped Bayer cover up “one of the worst drug-related medical disasters in history.” Meyer suggested that the issue should be “quietly solved without alerting the Congress, the medical community and the public.” This culture of accommodation continues to prevail at the FDA.
The Times reports that three other American pharmaceutical companies were involved in selling tainted blood plasma after a safer version existed: Armour Pharmaceutical, Baxter International and Alpha Therapeutic...
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Compulsory sterilization around the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilization#Other_countries
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Other Eugenics advocates:
http://www.amren.com/0111issue/0111issue.htm#article1
...The late Nobel Prize winner William Shockley argued we should pay people with low IQs to be sterilized. According to his “Bonus 1000” plan, a good incentive would be $1,000 for every IQ point under 100. Psychologist Raymond Cattell suggested the government should seek out intelligent children and pay their parents to have more. David Lykken of the University of Minnesota has once again floated the idea of licenses for parents. Sociologist Hugh LaFollette points out that couples must meet standards if they want to adopt a child; why not set standards for people who want to make a child?
Prof. Lynn states his own preference: “The ideal for humans would be a contraceptive virus acting for about 10 years that could be given to 12-year-old boys. When they were aged 22, they could apply for licenses for parenthood. If they failed to obtain these, they could be vasectomized.” Needless to say, ideas like this are going nowhere for now; as Prof. Lynn points out, according to the UN Declaration on Human Rights everyone has an absolute right to as many babies as he can make...
...Prof. Lynn is convinced, however, that an Asian country—most likely China—will soon institute a mandatory ES program for its population, and that the resulting improvement in its gene pool will tip the international balance of power decisively in its favor. Attitudes in China radically differ from those in the West. Chinese law already requires sterilization of mental retardates and those with genetic illnesses. Prenatal testing of fetuses is mandatory, and defectives must be aborted. No one with mental illness, venereal disease, or hepatitis may marry...
...Now that socialism is discredited, Prof. Lynn thinks the Chinese will fill the ideological void with eugenics. He predicts it will become the first, full-fledged eugenic state: all 12-year-old girls will be fitted with contraceptives, only approved couples will be permitted to have children, and ES will be used for all births. Psychopathy and genetic diseases will be eliminated, and IQ will stabilize at the theoretical maximum of about 200 in six or seven generations. Licensing parents will seem just as reasonable as licensing drivers.
Prof. Lynn predicts that in the short run, China’s rulers will clone themselves. In most cases this will mean talent and ability are passed on to the next generation, and it will make it easier for the oligarchs to pass on power to people they can trust—their own twins.
Prof. Lynn’s best guess at a timetable is that ES will be perfected and in obligatory use in China within ten years. Twenty years later there will be the first generation of ES adults, and 20 years after that, half the working population will have come from selected embryos. In 50 years, therefore, China will be the world’s most formidable power.
In the meantime, Prof. Lynn predicts that the United States will have continued to decline because of dysgenic fertility and dysgenic immigration. He says the country may break up into warring ethnic enclaves, but “however the details of the decline of the United States work out, it will forfeit its position as the leading world economic, scientific, and military power, and eventually cease to be a major force in global politics.”
He expects Europe to maintain its influence a little longer, because is has fewer non-white immigrants, but it will be no match for a racially homogeneous, eugenically bred China. China will eventually dominate the globe and run it like a colonial empire. In certain provinces, it might impose ES on the natives, but in places like Africa, which do not have the infrastructure for ES, it would be more likely to impose “robust classical eugenics...”
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