In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity

"Dan Kevles’s book was one of the first of a new generation of writers. It is quite an old book now, and is still great, which is pretty fantastic. It was the first of these new studies on eugenics. It is quite regionalist—America and Britain, largely, a little bit of Europe—so it does not cover everything, and that’s where the other books come in. What’s interesting and important about Kevles’s book is that it takes eugenics seriously as a science. The reason that’s important, I think, is because there’s this tendency for most people these days to be very hostile to the idea of eugenics. As you said, it fills people with horror. But at the time, it was really considered to be quite important as a science, and was taken very seriously by lots of people. Keveles’s book asks: what did science look like in this period? How can we understand this as part of the mainstream of science at the time—even though now we think of it as a junk science? That’s a difficult question. I would say that I don’t think eugenics has disappeared. We call it different things because we are frightened of the term, quite rightly. I don’t know that it should have a place in science, but I think it does still have a place in science."