The "New Eugenics": Reductio ad absurdum

techniques to the breeding of rice, the dietary staple of a majority of the planet's population. 1984 was the year Ronald Reagan was re-elected to a second term with what he saw as a strong popular mandate to press ahead with his New Right economic agenda of privatization and deregulation, along the lines that had been spelled out by John D. Rockefeller and others more than a decade earlier. American agribusiness had reached a major threshold in terms of its ability to influence USDA agricultural policy and, by extension, the world food market. The time was propitious to initiate a dramatic shift in the future control of the world food supply.

The "New Eugenics": Reductio ad Absurdum ... The genetic engineering initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation was no spur of the moment decision. It was the culmination of the research it had funded since the 1930's. During the late 1930's, as the foundation was still deeply involved in funding eugenics in the Third Reich, it began to recruit chemists and physicists to foster the invention of a new science discipline, which it named molecular biology to differentiate it from classical biology. The foundation developed molecular biology as a discipline partly to deflect and blunt growing social criticism of its racist eugenics. Nazi Germany had given eugenics a "bad name:'

The Rockefeller Foundation's President during the 1930's, Warren Weaver, was a physicist. He and Max Mason headed the foundation's new biology program. Their largesse in giving funds to scientific research projects gained the foundation enormous influence over the direction of science during the Great Depression by the mere fact they had funds to dispense to leading scientific researchers at a time of acute scarcity. From 1932 to 1957, the Rockefeller Foundation had handed out an impressive $90 million in grants to support the creation of the newfield of molecular biology.4 Molecular biology and the attendant work with genes was a Rockefeller Foundation creation in every sense of the word.

Borrowing generously from their work in race eugenics, the foundation scientists developed the idea of molecular biology from

the fundamental assumption that almost all human problems could be "solved" by genetic and chemical manipulations. In the 1938 Annual Report of the Rockefeller Foundation, Weaver first coined the term, "molecular biology" to describe their support for research to apply techniques of symbolic logic and other scientific disciplines to make biology "more scientific." The idea had been promoted during the 1920's by Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research biologist Jacques Loeb, who concluded from his experiments, that echinoderm larvae could be chemically stimulated to develop in the absence of fertilization, and that science would eventually come to control the fundamental processes of biology. The people in and around the Rockefeller institutions saw it as the ultimate means of social control and social engineering, eugenics.5

It seemed clear in 1932, when the Rockefeller Foundation launched its quarter-century program in that area, that the biological and medical sciences were ready "for a friendly invasion by the physical sciences". According to Warren Weaver:

[T)he tools are now available for discovering, on the most disciplined and precise level of molecular actions, how man's central nervous system really operates, how he thinks, learns, remembers, and forgets ... . Apart from the fascination of gaining some knowledge of the nature of the mind-brain-body relationship, the practical values in such studies are potentially enormous. Only thus may we gain information about our behavior of the sort that can lead to wise and beneficial control. 6

During World War II, Weaver and the Rockefeller Foundation were in the center of all international research in molecular biology. Three Rockefeller Institute (today Rockefeller University-w.e.) scientists Avery, MacLeod and McCarty identified what appeared to be the transmission of a gene from one bacterial cell to another. Their colleague, later prominent researcher at the Rockefeller University, geneticist Theodore Dobzhansky, noted at the time with great excitement, "we are dealing with authentic cases of inductions of specific mutations by specific treatments-a feat which geneticists have vainly tried to accomplish in higher organisms:' Already in 1941, Rockefeller scientists were laying the foundations for their