The Biological Future of Man

 The Biological Future of Man

Date	1962
Participants	A.J. Ayer, Donald MacKay, André Malraux, Peter Medawar, H.J. Muller, Lewis Mumford, Gregory Pincus, Vulimiri Ramalingaswami, Michael Ramsey, Albert Szent-Györgyi, Norbert Wiener, Norman C. Wright, John Zachary Young, Patrick Blackett, Sir Russell Brain, Jacob Bronowski, Colin Clark, Alex Comfort, Carleton Coon, J.B.S. Haldane, Hudson Hoagland, Julian Huxley, Sven Hörstadius, François Jacob, Joshua Lederberg, André Lwoff, W. Arthur Lewis
Perpetrators	CIBA Foundation, Gordon Wolstenholme
Description	Conference discussing "Do people have the right to have children at all?"

The Biological Future of Man was a 1962 conference.It luded 6 Nobel Prize recipients among the 26 particpants.

Do people have the right to have children at all?

Joshua Lederberg, a US molecular biologist known for his work in microbial genetics, artificial intelligence, and the United States space program, wrote:

The population explosion is one example of what can happen without planning and, as of now, there is no striking evidence that we have learned our lesson. We have policies for foreign aid, civil defense, television programming, advertising campaigns, and so on. But as far as the most important thing of all is concerned, what man himself is going to be, we have no policy (...) what should be stressed now is there is less time than you may think.

Francis Crick, who at the time of the Symposium had just been awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine a few weeks earlier,asked: Do people have the right to have children at all? during the discussion of " Eugenics and Genetics":

It would not be very difficult (…) for a government to put something into our food so that nobody could have children. Then possibly-and this is hypothetical-they could provide another chemical that would reverse the effect of the first, and only people licensed to bear children would be given this second chemical. This isn’t so wild that we need not discuss it. Is it the general feeling that people do have the right to have children? This is taken for granted because it is part of Christian ethics, but in terms of humanist ethics I do not see why people should have the right to have children. I think that if we can get across to people the idea that their children are not entirely their own business and that it is not a private matter, it would be an enormous step forward (emphasis added). If one did have a licensing scheme, the first child might be admitted on rather easy terms. If the parents were genetically unfavourable (emph. add.), they might be allowed to have only one child, or possibly two under certain special circumstances.

 

Known Participants

2 of the 27 of the participants already have pages here:

Participant	Description
A. J. Ayer	British spook and later Oxford professor
Julian Huxley	English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist

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References

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