The Genetics Of Violence Essay Research Paper — страница 3

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be homicide; 237 were suicide. Homicide is the fourth leading cause of death for children between one and nine years old, and in the fifteen to twenty-four age group, it is the second leading cause of death. Obviously, crime and violence do a considerable amount of damage to many American lives. Consequently, limited amounts of genetic and other biological research is being performed in order to find a genetic link, if any, to aggression resulting in violence and crime. In 1989, $20 million in funds were dedicated to violence research; 5% of those funds were allocated to the biology of violence. There is so much conflict over the use of funds dealing with the genetics of violence that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds no specific studies that attempt to link genes and

violence. In August of 1992, the NIH allocated $78,000 to fund a controversial conference in an effort to assess the social implications of the Human Genome Project. The support was immediately withdrawn after black political leaders and psychologists charged the conference?s agenda as being racist. The main opposition to the conference was formed by the Black Caucus, who argued that the roots of crime are based on social causes, such as poverty, racism, and unemployment, and these call on social solutions, not biological ones. Finally, in September of 1995, some 70 biologists, criminologists, historians, and philosophers gathered at a remote conference center in the Chesapeake Bay region. It was an NIH-sponsored conference that had been carefully planned for over three years,

made possible with a $133,000 from the NIH. Some of the scientists contended that if genes mold physiology, then they must mold psychology, and thus, antisocial behavior including violent crime must have a genetic component. Others at the conference pressed that evidence for genetic linkage to crime is circumstantial and a “racist pseudoscience”. Behind the tensions that seemed to dominate the conference was the horrors of past eugenics: the early twentieth-century campaign in the United States, and later in Germany, to purify the human gene pool by sterilizing the “feeble-minded.” The leaders of the eugenics movement in the United States, although they acted out of sincere desire to build a better society, could do little when their ideas took root in Nazi Germany in the

1930?s and soon became the Holocaust; this is where much genetic tension and fear stem from. One of the researchers, David Wasserman, a soft-spoken legal scholar, was shouting at the top of his lungs that, “There are a hell of a lot of people attending this conference who think the dangers of genetic research are as great in the long term as the dangers of atomic energy!” Many critics argued that the genetic studies are worse than inconclusive; they are racist and dangerous as they generally fail to recognize social issues. William Schneider, an Indiana University historian, in a formal protest statement, wrote, “Scientists as well as historians and sociologists must not allow themselves to be used to provide academic responsibility for racist pseudoscience.” Flag-waving

demonstrators, including self described communists, members of the Progressive Labor Party, and representatives of Support Coalition International (an alliance of psychiatric survivors endorsing a program against psychiatric medication) stormed the auditorium and seized the microphones. A student from Rutgers University proclaimed that, “You might think that you have the right to do the research that you are doing, but the bottom line is that it will be used to subjugate people.” It took two hours to clear out the protesters and another eight hours to bring the proceedings to a close. A few researchers admitted that they needed an eye-opener to see the social implications of behavioral genetics dealing with violence and crime, realizing that “Only historians have never had

their results misused.” Other federal research agencies have proposed a variety of monetary packages to promote this research, and it is estimated that these funded projects will cost the taxpayers as much as $50 million. However, this is not the main concern of the opponents to this research. It is assumed that very little is, at present, known about the human mind and its tendencies. Many believe that there is an over-reliance on drugs therapy in psychiatry, and that genetic violence research is cloaking the real problem. For example, overwhelming numbers of black children with problems with violence and aggressiveness are sent to psychiatrists where they are prescribed to pacifying drugs such as Ritalin of Prozac. Many black leaders felt that it is impossible to believe that