What Psychiatry Could Learn from Geneticists

What Psychiatry Could Learn from Geneticists

by Christine Johnson

Recently I had the pleasure of spending some time at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, the well-known genetics research facility in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Their main claim-to-fame is Dr. Watson, the man who unlocked the secret of DNA and coined the phrase “double helix”. Barbara McClintock also lived and worked there until her death. The list of brilliant researchers who have worked there is long and impressive.

There is a darker history to the lab as well. It was the epicenter of the American eugenics movement, and many wealthy patrons like the Rockefeller Family supported research there with the intention of promoting Social Darwinism. Dr. Charles Davenport and his Eugenics Record Office headed the work, which was located on the lab’s campus. Davenport authored the sinister tome “Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding” and personally wrote a model sterilization law that would eventually be adopted by twenty-two states.

Davenport’s work was eventually adopted and radicalized by the German Nazi Party and led to the Holocaust. All of those film clips you have seen of German school children measuring their noses and using eye color charts to determine how “Aryan” they were came from Davenport’s work at Cold Spring Harbor.

So why am I not irate with the lab, as I am with psychiatry? It is because much to the Lab’s credit, they have fully and completely owned up to their mistakes. They make their eugenics archives available to researchers. They do not hide their involvement. They have often helped writers and the public understand why the “science of eugenics” was a huge mistake not just in social terms, but also in scientific terms. They have re-examined their data and make their research flaws known. They cooperate with journalists and make it a point to teach their graduate students about their past errors in a required ethics class. Anyone who doubts that eugenics is poor science need only to look at the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking. Despite his many physical handicaps, his contribution to the world had been very important.

Whenever I have approached psychiatric organizations about the mistakes of lobotomy and leucotomy (a.k.a. leucotomy), they have reacted with indifference or hostility. In fact, without even having understood their past mistakes, they are embarking on a new program of psychosurgery by simply renaming it in a Stalinesque manner. Whether you call it psychosurgery or neurosurgery for mental disorder, the operations are still highly questionable. How they could do this without acknowledging their past mistakes is beyond me.

Cold Spring Harbor Labs is very vigilant about the potential uses of their work because they remember their history. Why can’t psychiatry do the same?

For more information on Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories and eugenics please visit:

http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/