“Hands off human beings”

16. Juni 2015 ∙ Moritz Nestor

The PR-company Farner advised the pro-PGD-camp: the topic «eugenics», «selection» should be avoided to win the vote. But: on 27th May 2015 Felix Gutzwiller, a prominent figure of the pro-camp, expressed in the «Neue Zürcher Zeitung»: «The most extended eugenics is practiced by nature itself by eliminating a great many embryos who are not capable of developing. In a laboratory you are doing nothing but this.» We can only be grateful for this sentence: If Felix Gutzwiller equates nature with the laboratory, he admits that it is about eugenics, after all. In the laboratory man breeds. But nature does not breed! Eugenics means: Man wants to breed human beings. The Social Darwinists and Mr Gutzwiller (as cited) imputes evolution with acting like a (breeding) man, claiming that man must take evolution in his own hands. – We should know whereto this would be leading. Nature has created life in more than four billion years. And now we want to know how to do it in 50 years? The PR office Farner advises the pro-camp: Impute the anti-PGD-camp with making people scared of eugenics! I am actually afraid of people who do not shy away from dealing with human beings in the lab as though they were peas! “Hands off human beings”, the great Swiss anthropologist Adolf Portmann warned in the sixties, when the man breeders gained the upper hand again.

Current Concerns, 16 June 2015, No 15/16 ISSN 1664-7963