Are scientists still tampering with ‘the language in which God created life?’
Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics
ADAM RUTHERFORD
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 288 PP, £12.99)
Tablet bookshop price £11.69 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Adam Rutherford is a geneticist at University College London and a popular science writer and broadcaster. Like his earlier book How to Argue with a Racist, Control is motivated by a passionate commitment to resist the appropriation of “pseudoscience” for dark political ends. It is, he writes, “a book about two forces that shape us: control and freedom”. He turns an unblinking gaze on his own profession, including the murky history of UCL’s entanglement with the ideology of eugenics and its honouring of Victorian polymath and pioneering eugenicist Francis Galton, whose name has been erased from the university’s identity as an acknowledgement of how grotesque his beliefs were. Like others, such as Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher, who both occupied the Chair until recently named after him, Galton’s undeniable contribution to modern science accorded him an heroic status which cannot be defended in view of his abhorrent politics.
