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Science, Technology, and Values Week 5 - Coggle Diagram
Science, Technology, and Values Week 5
Eugenics: the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable
Phrenology: observation of physical characteristics of the cranium in order to draw conclusions about ones character. Found its foothold in Europe in the 19th century
Phrenology in popular culture: Trump, cat
Francis Galton: developed the field of psychometrics (deals with psychological measurement) and largely responsible for the field of eugenics
to prove that intelligence is hereditary, Galton constructed a family tree. Unfortunately, he didn't have any kids of his own, so he couldn't prove his theory
in 1883 he published Inquiries into Human Facilites which dealt with the good and bad sides of inheritance, and coined the term eugenics
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At the time when eugenics was gaining traction, there were lots of social ills present (Immigration, Industrialization, Urbanization, WWI, and the Great Depression). This lead to eugenics being used to place blame on certain groups or to explain these events
Types of eugenics:
Positive Eugenics: The idea that those with desirable traits should be encouraged to reproduce, and those with undesirable traits are asked voluntarily to refrain from reporduction
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Bollinger Baby Scenario: a child was birthed with many birth defects, and both the mother and doctor believed it was best to let the child die
many were outraged, but one person, Helen Keller, demonstrated her firm belief in eugenics by affirming the doctor's decision
The doctor went on to make a movie titled The Black Stork, speculating on what the child's life would have looked like
Teddy Roosevelt described the idea of Race Suicide by saying that those with desirable traits and the means to raise children are cowards if they do not do so
Buck vs. Bell: a case of state sterilization where a young woman was raped. Because of this, she was deemed feeble-minded and sterilized
These forced sterilizations do not happen anymore, but they were still present in society after WW2
This case was carried all the way to the supreme court, where it was deemed a just societal sacrafice
CRISPR is a genome editing tool. The acronym is Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats
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Cas9
Cas9 stands for CRISPR assocaited protien 9. It is used to cut up strands of DNA, which leads to the apt comparison to a pair of scissors.
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Dr. Josiah Zayner is a former NASA scientist who clames to be the first person to attempt to edit their DNA using CRISPR. He also was responsible for the joke craigslist post about a billionaire looking to change his genome.
He has also admitted that he regretted injecting himself with CRSIPR edited genomes live on the internet
CRISPR is controversial because it has the potential to create designer babies and permanently alter entire lineages, but it does offer a better alternative than eugenics