The commercialization of ‘big science’ is in full swing, leading to situations in which the ethical principles of academia are beginning to be compromised. This is exemplified by the profitable business of genetic ancestry testing. The goals of this sort of ‘big science’ are not necessarily in any way novel, however. In particular, large genotyping projects have a certain start‐up time when their design is frozen in, so that the projects often lag behind the development of genetic knowledge. On the (...) other hand, extremely provisional knowledge about potential disease markers is being rapidly turned into questionable ‘tests’, purporting to determine risk factors for complex disorders, by private companies that are eager to get their share of a profitable market of the future. The flow of money generated by such concerns looks likely to erode traditional research operations and small‐scale projects, which risk becoming pebbles on the ‘big science’ landscape. BioEssays 30:1246–1251, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper traces the history of artificial insemination by selected donors as a strategy for positive eugenic improvement. While medical artificial insemination has a longer history, its use as a eugenic strategy was first mooted in late nineteenth-century France. It was then developed as ‘scientific motherhood’ for war widows and those without partners by Marion Louisa Piddington in Australia following the Great War. By the 1930s AID was being more widely used clinically in Britain as a medical solution to male (...) infertility for married couples. In 1935 English postal clerk, Herbert Brewer, promoted AID as the socialization of the germ plasm in a eugenic scheme. The next year Hermann Muller, American Drosophila geneticist and eugenicist, presented his plan for human improvement by AID to Stalin. Some twenty years later, Muller, together with Robert Klark Graham, began planning a Foundation for Germinal Choice in California. This was finally opened in 1980 as the first practical experiment in eugenic AID, producing some 215 babies over the twenty years it functioned. While AID appeared to be a means of squaring a eugenic circle by separating paternity from love relationships, and so allowing eugenic improvement without inhibiting individual choice in marriage, it found very little favour with those who might use it, not least because of a couple’s desire to have their ‘own’ children has always seemed stronger than any eugenic aspirations. No state has ever contemplated using AID as a social policy. (shrink)