Is History Enough? Dissociation and Nazi Science

At the risk of asking a rather naive, dangerous question, I couldn't help but think about whether this emotional history was effective. I ask this because to me the core of this exhibit is that it is dangerous for politicians to apply scientific principles for the "good of the population." And yet, this is exactly what we do all the time: we set health standards; we talk about curbing diabetes and obesity; we make laws about sugar, carbs, fat, and salt; we incentivize healthy people with lower health insurance premiums; and we select mates (in life and in the sperm bank) based on pedigree.

Lombardo's talk made this even sharper, because many famous, many smart people have in the past have pushed eugenics. This doesn't make it right, but it does indicate it is appealing. 

My problem with the exhibit (and this gets to the heart of the issue about representing science) is that the history doesn't do enough to help us think through these issues. Even though eugenics becomes evil, we leave and we can't draw lines between the practices we see in this exhibit and the opening scene of Idiocracy (a scene that has heaps of traction). 

 

This is partly a bioethics question. But it's also a question of dissociation. Hearkening back to my Race exhibit, there I analyzed how it distinguished between race as a biological reality (which doesn't exist) and race as a social construction (which does). That dissociation was roughly carried out, but the core of its purpose is really important. In Deadly Medicine, however, eugenics is evil, but then we leave the exhibit and begin to think about some of the same ideas that led directly to the eugenics movement. Some of the ideas about the health of the population seem to make sense. Yet the exhibit gives us no tools with which to draw these lines or make these distinctions. Where does eugenics start and stop? How are we able to say that science over here is doing good work improving the health of the population and over there it's doing dangerous work we must stop? By seeming to lump all thinking about the health of the population under the heading of "eugenics," we are left with an emotional response, but we are not provided the tools to think through these larger, very important and very current issues.