Marek Orko Vácha: From 19th Century Eugenics to the Human Genome Project
- Where: Václav Havel Library, Ostrovní 13, Prague 110 00
- When: April 15, 2015, 19:00 – 21:00
What nature has done blindly and randomly over aeons we are now about to do in a quick and targeted manner. In 1895 Charles Darwin published his most famous work.
Logically, it eventually inspired eugenics as an attempt to improve the generation of mankind. Positive eugenics, the attempt to eliminate that which was undesired, developed in an unfortunate manner, producing terrible results that stretched all the way to Auschwitz. Out of fear of a modern form of eugenics, when the idea of mapping the human genome was born in the 1980s some 3% of the annual budget was dedicated to ethical considerations of the undertaking. This gave rise to the most subsidised ethical project in the planet’s history.