What does Velázquez’ 1656 painting “Las Meninas” have to do with the complex ethics surrounding the relatively modern day phenomenon of eugenics? This was the trail of seemingly unrelated thoughts that comprised Lord Robert Winston’s highly anticipated talk “Medicine in Renaissance Art” in Wills’ Great Hall on Monday afternoon.
He introduced his topic by exploring depictions of congenital disease in Medieval and Renaissance Art, the most interesting being “Las Meninas”, a painting by Diego Velázquez, one of the leading artists of the Spanish Golden Age. Velázquez was one of the main painters in the court of Philip IV and “Las Meninas” is widely regarded to be his masterpiece. It depicts the Infanta Margaret Theresa surrounded by members of court and Velázquez himself even features as he paints a large canvas. It is one of the most widely analysed paintings in art history, full of intricate detail, questioning the nature of reality and illusion. However, the focus of Lord Winston were the dwarfs who feature in the painting beside the Infanta.
This focus on congenital defects formed the springboard for his wider discussion on eugenics, an unsettling social philosophy that advocates the “improvement” of the genetic quality of the human race, an idea commonly associated with the Nazi’s quest for the “Aryan Race.” This “improvement” of the human race would either be through reducing rates of reproduction in those with undesired traits or more recently, through scientific processes such as gene selection in embryos.
I was shocked to learn that sterilisation had been relatively commonplace in the USA around the 1920’s, when women who were deemed to have “sub normal intelligence” were sterilised without consent. Lord Winston gave the tragic example of a case in 1927 where a woman who was considered to have “sub normal intelligence” had been raped at the age of 13. She gave birth to her child who was taken into care, after which she was sterilised, being falsely told she was having a procedure to remove her appendix. This particular case (Buck v Bell) was used as defence by Nazi war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials after World War II, the underlying idea essentially being “you (the USA) practiced forced sterilisation and eugenics so how can you suggest there is anything wrong with us doing it?”
Forced sterilisation of women also took place in the UK around the mid 20th century. This often took place when a woman sought an abortion: a surgeon might agree to perform the procedure but on the condition that they would sterilize the woman at the same time, their deeply flawed and inappropriate moral judgement being that if a woman chose to abort a pregnancy then she could not possibly deserve or want another child. Lord Winston described how he learned about this when he performed procedures to reverse these sterilisations and published a paper detailing his findings in 1977.
The discussion then turned to focus on modern day gene technologies and the capacity we now have to screen embryos for particular diseases, create three parent babies and even experiments that have been carried out on mice to create “super mice” who can run on a treadmill for hours. Are these scientific breakthroughs potentially damaging to society and the human race as a whole? If we can produce a super mouse, then what is stopping us from creating a Frankenstein-esque super human and would this necessarily even be a bad thing? Although these incredible discoveries have the capacity to have positive effects, if left unregulated they also have the potential to be hugely damaging.
The final question he posed to us was one that I felt summarised the root of the unease that exists around the prospect of creating “super-humans”: in creating a super human, whether through traditional eugenics or through gene technology, would we lose our unique, innate humanity?