Science czar's support of eugenics should raise eyebrows

Science czar’s support for eugenics should raise eyebrows
By: Mark Hemingway
Special to The Examiner
July 15, 2009

As the Senate’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor heat up, there’s yet another controversy brewing about a President Barack Obama nominee. It seems that some aren’t happy with the pick of Dr. Francis S. Collins to head the National Institutes of Health.

Collins, who led the effort to map the human genome, is responsible for one of the greatest scientific achievements in history. And yet, some have reservations. Why? Because, like the majority of Americans, he’s a Christian.

The New York Times dutifully reported: “He wrote a book called ‘The Language of God,’ and he has given many talks and interviews in which he described his conversion to Christianity as a 27-year-old medical student. Religion and genetic research have long had a fraught relationship, and some in the field complain about what they see as Dr. Collins’s evangelism.” The story was headlined “Pick to Lead Health Agency Draws Praise and Some Concern.”

How this particular complaint rises to a genuine concern would likely baffle the majority of Americans who are Christian. It’s even more troubling when you consider that last weekend, a blogger at Zombietime.com unearthed a book written more than 30 years ago by John Holdren, Obama’s “science czar.”

In the book, “Ecoscience,” co-written with neo-Malthusian prophet of doom and scientific laughingstock Paul Ehrlich, Holdren advocated a series of bizarre and horrifying measures to deal with an overpopulation threat that never materialized.

Among the suggestions in the book: Laws requiring the abortion or adoption of illegitimate children; sterilizing women after having two children; legally requiring “reproductive responsibility” to those deemed by pointy-headed eugenicists to “contribute to general social deterioration”; and incredibly, Holdren, apparently under the impression “Dr. Strangelove” was a how-to manual, entertained the idea of putting sterilizing agents in the drinking water.

Naturally, these population control measures would be enforced by “an armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force.” Very recently, Holdren was still listing the book on his curriculum vitae.

What, pray tell, did the Times report when Holdren was announced as science czar in December? The headline noted his “dogged work against global perils” and quoted a colleague saying, “No president since the days of Benjamin Franklin will ever have been so well-served in matters scientific.” For those of you keeping score at home, Franklin died less than a year after the day Washington was elected.

Thus far no major media has picked up on the Holdren story, while coverage of Collins demonstrates the press will find even the thinnest excuse to report on a largely nonexistent conflict between religion and science. For once, it would be nice if those in the media recognized that the ethics of influential scientists are sometimes a bigger cause for concern than what religious believers think about science.

Mark Hemingway is a writer in Washington, D.C.

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