QUEST FOR PERFECTION: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings

In Quest for Perfection, Gina Maranto traces the history of society's attempts to control human destiny by regulating birth outcomes. Drawing together material from the fields of animal behavior, paleontology, anthropology, embryology, genetics, and reproductive medicine, Maranto provides a riveting account of how the perfecting impulse has colored Western social and political thought and history. More importantly, she explores how the development of birth technologies, from artificial insemination in the 1800s to in vitro fertilization in the 1970s, was carried out by scientists who foresaw - and in many cases championed - the eugenical potential of manipulating sperm, eggs, and embryos.
Maranto reveals that eugenics, rightly reviled for the crimes committed in its name in Nazi Germany and elsewhere, is far from a dead enterprise. Today, in treating couples for infertility, medicine has edged closer than ever to the made-to-order baby. With the knowledge gained from the massive worldwide effort to map the human chromosome, the Human Genome Project, scientists will gain greater power to dictate the essential makeup of future children.
Promoted on therapeutic grounds, the enterprise of assisted reproduction has raised exhilarating and frightening prospects: from infants born without debilitating defects and inherited diseases to the likelihood that individuals and governments will decide which embryos are worthy of being brought to term based not on the sanctity of life but upon parental whim or societal fiat. Quest for Perfection is an important contribution to the debate over the ethical and political implications of attempts to direct our own evolution.

In a provocative, richly informative report, freelance science writer Maranto combines a tough-minded, unsentimental look at the infertility industry with a historical survey of attempts to influence childbearing through forced sterilization, selective infanticide and control of mating. Eighty percent of attempts at in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer and other forms of assisted reproduction fail, she warns, and marriages are often destroyed by the rage, recriminations, stress and anxiety resulting from infertility treatment. Maranto skeptically views the modern science of manipulating sperm, eggs and embryos as a distant stepchild of the eugenics movement launched by English anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, who put forth a scheme of selective breeding for human betterment. She exposes the racist and anti-immigrant overtones of eugenics in the U.S., where dozens of states by the 1920s passed laws requiring compulsory sterilization of individuals deemed "unfit," meaning diseased, dependent, delinquent, epileptic, blind, deaf or deformed. Maranto thoughtfully examines the ethical and legal issues surrounding surrogate mothers, egg donation and cloning of human embryos, an experimental technique that is expected to yield the world's first delivery of artificial twins within the next few years, unless it is banned by international law. She urges tighter regulatory controls to ensure that new reproductive technologies are not abused by those with misguided eugenic notions. Readers Subscription main selection; Library of Science alternate.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The perfectibility of the human species remains one of the most controversial subjects in science, and Maranto, an award- winning science writer, explains why. She begins with a look at a meeting of the cutting-edge specialists in ``assisted reproduction.'' Physicians whose concern is to help infertile couples achieve parenthood, whether through artificial insemination, hormone treatment, or in vitro fertilization (IVF), are the new medical elite. Their specialty grows out of the oldest of human concerns: the regulation of the population. The author traces back to ancient societies the practice of infanticide and the enslavement of abandoned children. But the arrival of modern biology brought the eugenics movement, proposing that regulation of human breeding was as natural as the selective breeding of livestock. While respected scientists endorsed the concept, Maranto argues that its logical conclusion was the Nazi extermination of ``undesirables.'' Meanwhile, research on human fertilization and conception was proceeding. The first recorded application of artificial insemination to humans was in 1884, when Dr. William Pancoast of Philadelphia performed the procedure--with the permission of neither the woman or her husband. The growth of the practice was controversial with legal and religious authorities. As with most of the other practices Maranto discusses, doctors were generally content to follow the available technology to its natural conclusion. Further controversy followed the development in the 1970s of IVF, and the legal tangles accompanying surrogate motherhood are still unresolved. The new cutting edge is genetic therapy, which promises to eliminate such diseases as Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia, and could allow parents the dubious ability to choose traits such as skin color and gender. While Maranto scrupulously presents the views of all sides, it is clear that her own position is that science has gone too far. A comprehensive, passionate, and thought-provoking look through the door into a brave new world in which we may find ourselves before we realize it. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Test-tube babies, surrogate mothers, frozen embryos--new reproductive technologies give hope to infertile couples and to families living under the shadow of hereditary diseases. Maranto, however, raises sobering questions about the moral and social implications of these technologies. When doctors choose sperm donors or frozen embryos on the basis of intellectual or physical ideals, for instance, are they not reviving the dangerous dreams that once fired Nazi imaginations? Maranto traces the eugenic impulse back not just to the Nazis but also to Plato and to prehistoric tribes who killed physically defective infants. Modern advocates of better human breeding have refined their procedures and sanitized their rhetoric, but psychological distress still awaits the brave-new-world children who must try to unravel the contracts that made some impoverished woman their surrogate mother or some cash-hungry medical student their sperm-donor father. Maranto has researched the professional literature exhaustively, but she does not write for specialists. Lucid and timely, her book sounds an urgent alarm for anyone who cares about what it means to be human. Bryce Christensen

Many recent publications have examined the ethics and issues surrounding assisted reproduction. This book also provides a lengthy account of the history of humankind's attitudes toward reproduction. Science journalist Maranto begins her analysis in prehistoric times and continues to the present, discussing infanticide, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, cloning, and germ-line gene therapy. While the author is critical of the eugenics movement, she discusses its evolution in great detail and in a relatively straightforward manner. The long bibliography is useful for additional research on this topic. Readers are warned that the writing is fairly technical and some basic knowledge of genetics and scientific terminology is assumed. Recommended for health science collections in medical or large academic libraries.?Tina Neville, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.