NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
... rather than to label and limit students. There was someone that wanted to use this test to distinguish between people of good mental health and those that were not mentally healthy. The person that wanted to do this was H H Goddard. He brought Binets scale to America from France but he manipulated it to interpret innate intelligence. Goddard believed that the American population was at risk from the swift reproduction of the feeble-minded and from immigration.
He also came up with a scale that showed that anyone with an IQ lower than seventy was a moron and anyone with an IQ of one hundred and thirty and higher was considered a genius. The reason he didnt want feeble-minded people reproducing is he thought that intelligence came from one gene and that that gene was passed from one generation to the next generation. He did conduct some research. He sent 2 women to Ellis Island to test the immigrants that were coming into America. The results were about eighty percent of the people from each group got scores that showed that they were feeble-minded but Goddard fiddled around with the scores till he got the numbers to fifty percent. The tests had some flaws because of the language barrier and the unfamiliarity.
Goddard had a group of people that he thought was a good example of the gene being passed from one generation to the next. The people were a pauper family in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. He had traced their ancestry back to an upstanding man and a tavern wench and he institutionalized one of their children. The Supreme Court got involved in a eugenics battle called the Buck v.
Bell case. This case was to see what they could do about sterilization. The court eventually decided that this was left up to the state. Most of the states went along with the idea of sterilization of the feeble-minded because by 1931 thirty states had passed the law and thousands of people were sterilized by legal mandate.
There was also the Immigration Act of 1924 that helped the U. S. in getting rid of some of the feeble-minded people. This act severely limited immigration through firm quotas. There were limited based on reports that identified weakness of numerous races and ethnicities. This act stood uncontested until 1965.
The American Eugenics Society, founded in 1926, supported the proposition that the wealth and social position of the upper classes was justified by a superior genetic endowment. American eugenists also supported restrictions on immigration from nations with inferior stock, such as Italy, Greece, and countries of eastern Europe, and argued for the sterilization of insane, retarded, and epileptic citizens in the United States. As a result of their efforts, sterilization laws were passed in more than half of the U. S.
states, and isolated instances of involuntary sterilization continued into the 1970 s. The assumptions of eugenists came under sharp criticism beginning in the 1930 s and were discredited after the German Nazis used eugenics to support the extermination of Jews and the murder of many Gypsies, mentally ill persons, and homosexuals. Since the 1950 s there has been a renewed interest in eugenics. Because certain diseases (e.
g. , hemophilia and Tay-Sachs disease) are now known to be genetically transmitted, many couples choose to undergo genetic screening, in which they learn the chances that their offspring might be affected by some combination of their hereditary backgrounds. Couples at risk of passing on genetic defects may opt to remain childless or to adopt children. Furthermore, it is now possible to diagnose certain genetic defects in the unborn. Many couples choose to terminate a pregnancy that involves a genetically disabled offspring.
These developments have reinforced the eugenic aim of identifying and eliminating undesirable genetic material. Counterbalancing this trend, however, has been medical progress that enables victims of many genetic diseases to live fairly normal lives. Genetic surgery, in which harmful genes are altered by direct manipulation, is also being studied; if perfected, it could obviate eugenic arguments for restricting reproduction among those who carry harmful genes. Such conflicting innovations have complicated the controversy surrounding eugenics. Moreover, suggestions for expanding eugenics programs, which range from the creation of sperm banks for the genetically superior to the potential cloning of human beings, have met with vigorous resistance from the public, which often views such programs as unwarranted interference with nature or as opportunities for abuse by authoritarian regimes. The Army, around the time of World War One, wanted to weed out all the recruits that were feeble-minded so they appointed Robert M.
Yerkes, who was a professor of Psychology at Harvard in 1915, straight to the rank of colonel. While there he came up with the Army Alpha and the Army Beta exams and tested 1. 75 million recruits with these tests. The Army Alpha exam was a written exam for all the literate recruits. If they failed the Army Alpha exam they had to take the Army Beta exam which was all pictures.
If they still failed the Army Beta exam they had their individual IQ tested. Yerkes had certain grades that he gave the recruits based on their scores on these exams. Some of the worse scores were a C, D, and a D and E. If someone got a C, according to Yerkes they were of low average intelligence and should only be used in ordinary practice. If someone got a D, Yerkes said that they were rarely suited for tasks requiring special skills. Finally, if someone got a D and E, Yerkes said that they should not be expected to read and understand written directions.
After doing these tests Yerkes found that the average mental age for white men was thirteen and it had been 16. This created a new incentive to control the breeding of the feeble-minded. He also found that European immigrants could be graded by their country of origin and many of the men from other nations were morons. Another thing that he found was that people of darker skin had a lower average test score than light-skinned people. There were however some problems with these exams just like Goddard's, in that they were strictly timed, and there were many zeros which leads you to assume that many of the people taking the tests did not understand what they were supposed to do. Yerkes also thought that most black recruits did not attend school and this reflected low natural intelligence.
Yerkes had confused cause and effect when he said this. Some of the reasons blacks did not go to school during this time because schools were segregated, the education was not equal to what the whites were getting, and many of the black schools were poor. But his own data revealed that blacks from the North scored better on the exams because they attended more school than those in the South. Every intelligence test that followed was based on these two tests, and these tests also showed that the United States faced a real problem from immigration, and the results of the tests were mentioned again and again, in the debates of the Immigration Restriction Act. With all the new technologies we have been getting you have to ask yourself are we creating a new eugenics with genetic testing.
Within the past few years doctors have been able to do prenatal testing in which the doctor extracts some of the amniotic fluid from around the fetus and that fluid is tested for over one hundred and fifty diseases. Some of these diseases range from the fatal to infants, Tay - Sachs disease, to Down syndrome which can have slight effects to complete debilitation. Also, what has been happening very recently, is doctors are scared not to do the testing because they do not want to be sued by women who give birth to a child with a birth defect. Because of this the Department of Professional Liability of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists had alerted all the members that they need to inform all pregnant patients of the availability of screening for neural tube defects. Speaking of this, what would health insurance companies do if they got these tests? Why would not they try to raise the cost, or not even give it to someone who has a fetus with a birth defect?
Well, there are many traits, genetic and environmental, that the insurance company could see and use against you. Yerkes brought the testing into the mass populous when he was appointed into the Army. Also how we have still been practicing eugenics just under a different guise called genetic testing. But, doctors do not want people to think about it as a form of eugenics. So, what do you think about genetic testing and where could it go from here?
We might just have to look at the movie Gattaca for the answer to that. Bibliography: Adams, Mark B. , ed. The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Genetics, Eugenics and Evolution.
British Journal for the History of Science 22 (3): 257 - 375, September 1989. Lubinsky, Mark S. Scientific Aspects of Early Eugenics. Journal of Genetic Counseling 2 (2): 77 - 92, June 1993.
Paul, Diane B. Is Human Genetics Disguised Eugenics? In Genes and Human Self-Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Reflections on Modern Genetics. Robert F. Weir, Susan C.
Lawrence, and Evan Fales, eds. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994. , pp. 67 - 83. Galton, Francis. Essays in Eugenics.
New York: Garland, 1985. 109 p. Paul, Diane B. Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1995. 158 p.
Rifkin, Jeremy. A Eugenic Civilization. In his: The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World. New York: Jeremy P. Teacher/Putnam, 1998. pp. 116 - 147.
Testart, Jacques. The New Eugenics and Medical ized Reproduction. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 4 (3): 304 - 312, Summer 1995.
Free research essays on topics related to: one hundred, birth defect, tay sachs disease, genetic testing, genetic defects
Research essay sample on Tay Sachs Disease Genetic Defects
