The program, known as T4, would ultimately claim 200,000 lives. It operated on a scale so far beyond what the Nazis had attempted before that they had to invent new technology for the slaughter—includ...
Skinner and his colleagues launched a new study to see how far this effect could get passed down. They exposed more female rats to vinclozolin and then bred descendants for several generations. Even a...
One reason that cells break down bone is that in old age they make less of a protein called TERT. In 2012, researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre coaxed old mice to make extra TERT...
Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties, Galton predicted.
In the picture, Burbank has a grandfatherly smile, a shock of gray hair, a starched collar, and a black tie. The image belonged to an earlier chapter in the history of heredity, when breeders could us...
In 1973, the year of his death, Garrett railed against the constitutional right to vote, complaining how the vote of the feeble-minded person counts as much as that of an intelligent man.
In 1814 the breeders founded an organization, the title of which was—deep breath—The Association of Friends, Experts and Supporters of Sheep Breeding for the achievement of a more rapid and more thoro...
If heredity is a kind of memory, methylation suffers radical amnesia in every generation.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, eugenics had begun taking root in the United States, and there it flowered into darker blooms. American eugenicists wanted to prevent people with bad traits from...
According to Goddard’s standards, 47 percent of the white soldiers and 89 percent of the blacks should be categorized as morons. The average white soldier, the psychologists found, had a mental age of...
When Morgan looked at the pedigrees of families like the Kallikaks, he did not see undeniable proof of the heredity of feeblemindedness. He saw instead many generations of poor people suffering enduri...
When Adolf Hitler was imprisoned in 1924, he learned of the Kallikaks in a book he read about heredity. Soon after, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, in which he mimicked the language of American eugenicists,...
Some ancient eukaryote swallowed a photosynthesizing bacteria and became a sunlight gathering alga. Millions of years later one of these algae was devoured by a second eukaryote. This new host gutted...
It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights, Pearl wrote. Though the mind has gone away, though he cannot spea...
In 2011, a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl named Chen Aida Ayash was killed in a car accident. After her death, her parents asked for doctors to collect some eggs from her cadaver. They had to go to c...
In 2009, for example, a team of scientists at MIT succeded in implanting a wireless electrode into a zebra fish. With the press of a button, the scientists could wirelessly transmit a signal to the so...
Dolphins may even be able to name each other with signature whistles. But their society may nevertheless be one of an overlapping network of minds, wandering linked through a transparent ocean.
Based on their research, the Sanger scientists estimated that an embryo gains two or three new mutations every time its cells double.
Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons that responded to touching their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire i...
Goddard seemed comfortable with the notion that 40 percent of immigrants were morons. It is admitted on all sides that we are getting now the poorest of each race,