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The Advent of the Genetic Quotient
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
This article is intended to be both an analysis, and also an account: that of a generation of young citizens, to which I belong, which is both enthusiastic about and worried by recent advances in genetics. In the modern world mind set evolves very rapidly. In the late 1960s women demanded ‘a baby when I want!’ The right to contraception followed. Then, in the early 1970s, another slogan was heard: ‘a baby if I want.’ Shortly afterwards, a woman's right to abortion was recognized. Now, new demands are increasingly being synthesized as: ‘a baby of the kind I want.’ The spectre of eugenics is slowly and insidiously being reborn at the heart of democracy.
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- Copyright © ICPHS 2002
References
Notes
1. A. Carol, Histoire de l'eugénisme en France (History of eugenics in France), Paris, Seuil 1995.
2. The ‘Genetic Quotient' is a new concept which I introduced and analysed in my doctoral thesis in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical and Biological Sciences in Paris. See G. Bénichou, Le Quotient génétique. Vers une hiérarchie sanitaire des génomes humains? (The Genetic Quotient. Towards a health hierarchy of the human genome?), submitted in November 1999, in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical and Biological Sciences in Paris (UPV) (board of examiners composed of J. Testart, J. Toubon, D. Durand, D. Bégué, A. Baudart, D. Lagarde).
3. M. Serres, A.-R. Chancholle, A visage différent (With a different face), Paris, Hermann 1997.
4. Supreme Court of Appeal ruling, 17 November 2000.
5. H. Jonas, Le principe responsabilité (The prime responsibility), IV, 5, trans. J. Greisch, Paris, Cerf 1997.
6. M. Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, La volonté de savoir (History of sexuality, The desire to know), Paris, Gallimard 1976, p.184.
7. G. Bénichou, ‘Comme maitres et possesseurs de la nature', une réflexion philosophique sur la privatisation du génome humain' (‘“As masters and possessors of nature”, a philosophical reflection on the privatization of the human genome’), in Les Cahiers du CCNE (CCNE Notebooks), No.25, September 2000, p.13-19.
8. N. Fresco, Le clonage humain (Human cloning), Paris, Seuil 1999, p.189 et seq.