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Summary: Essential reading the age of the Human Genome Project
Review: Benno Muller-Hill's study examines two issues that demand the attention of anyone interested in science, history and society. The first is the story of how German scientists - pioneers in the study of genetics in the human population - lent their scientific prestege to the mind-numbing brutality of the Nazis. Their scholarly works on "Race-hygiene" with its thinly disguised anti-semitism produced first the sterilization of thousands of "undesirables" in the 1930s - under a guise of scientific acceptablility and then escalated into the industrial scale murder that the world knows as the Holocaust.A second major thread is how the scientific perpetrators - such as Verscher and his student - the more notorious Mengele - survived the war and in Verscher's case were continued to be honored by European scientific societies into the 1960. Not just Germans - but British, French Italians and Americans chose to turn a blind eye as they presented awards to the collaborator in Mengele's Auschwitz "twin-studies". Benno Muller-Hill has uncovered the documentation of these whitewashed academics in the archives of the current German national research institutes. His discoveries and publications have been met with stoney silence, and the locking of archives and papers. His book may be the most through and well documented account that will be available for many years to come. As he notes as we enter the age of the Human Genome we need to remember that scientific competentence is no protection from murderous immorality - that we should not hide or forget what has been done under the guise of "scientific reason" in past and that the most advanced science is no substitute for ethical and moral judgement in future.
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