Eugenics : The Future of Human Life in the 21st Century

In the continuing media furore over "designer babies" and the race to complete the map of human DNA - in other words, to identify the individual genes that make us who we are - scientists and commentators rarely use the word that describes this new ethical and technical minefield: "eugenics". Since the horrendous experiments of Nazi death camps the word has laboured under a sinister reputation, yet those perverted and racially motivated abominations should not blind us to what eugenics really is: the use of science for the qualitative and quantitative improvement of our genetic constitution. David Galton's accessible survey of the history, ethics and potential of this much-maligned branch of science aims to reclaim the term. From Ancient Greece to Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler and the Human Genome Project, "Eugenics" is an account of our struggle to change the way we are, and where that struggle might take us in the future.