Wellcome Witness Seminar on Clinical Genetics in Britain: origins and development, London, 23 September 2008

Typescript copies of Fraser's contributions to discussions of L. S. Penrose and C. O. Carter, and related material.

2008

1 file

George Fraser recorded,

‘I am adding my interventions concerning Carter and Penrose at the Wellcome Witness Seminar Clinical Genetics in Britain: Origins and Development. I was involved in prolonged negotiations with the editors about these contributions and I was still waiting for a final draft when I received the book, to find to my surprise that the main part of my contribution about Carter had been edited out altogether. Lionel strongly disagreed with Carter’s eugenical inclinations and views. Having taken up the Galton Chair of Eugenics in 1945, Lionel eventually managed to substitute Human Genetics for Eugenics in the title. In addition to the contributions, I am sending the papers which Carter wrote with a eugenic emphasis:

Carter, C.O., ‘Intelligence and fertility’, British Medical Journal (1956)

Carter, C.O., ‘Differential fertility by intelligence’ in Meade, J. E. and Parkes, A. S., eds. Genetic and Environmental Factors in Human Ability, (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1966)

I also include a relevant paper by Kenneth Hutton to which I referred in the Witness Seminar:

Hutton, K., ‘Intelligence quotients and differential fertility - some observations from Winchester College’, Eugenics Review, 44 (1953).

Both Carter and Hutton were scholars of Winchester College and Carter encouraged Hutton to write this paper. Hutton taught me chemistry when I was a scholar of Winchester College myself. The motivations behind these papers were concerns about the supposed, albeit undocumented, possibility of a decline in intelligence in the population, and, as a consequence, the desirability of promoting fertility among those of above normal intelligence as opposed to those of under-average intelligence. I should like to emphasize that these concerns and anxieties have not been shared by the large majority of scientists working in the field of human and medical genetics.

Thus, for example, Lionel Penrose, a quintessentially egalitarian person, regarded human beings as forming one whole rather than separating them into categories of superior human beings and of inferior human beings. He gave much thought to this question of the relationship between fertility and intelligence, and he showed by mathematical modelling that it is entirely possible for the average intelligence of the population to remain unaltered even if those of above normal intelligence have fewer children than those of under-average intelligence. There is a simplified explanation of his reasoning in the article by Cyril Clarke which is included - 'Lionel Penrose: some aspects of his life and work', Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London, Vol. 8 (1974). Cyril Clarke was drawing on Lionel Penrose’s discussion of the problem in his book, The Biology of Mental Defect, (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972)’.