MARCH OF THE NEUROCONS.
Written by Elizabeth Ewen to
The New York Times Magazine,
March 11, 2007.

In Jeffrey Rosen’s cover story, “The Brain on the Stand: How Neuroscience is Transforming the Legal System” (March 11, 2007), there is a revealing, if apparently innocuous, sentence early in the article. Visiting Owen Jones, a leader in the neuroscientifc community, in his office at Vanderbilt University, Rosen observed that Jones’s office “is decorated with a human skull and calipers, like those the phrenologists once used to measure the human skull.” The article then details how brains scans can be used to analyze criminal activity, past, present and future, not as a result of social conditions or behavior but as the independent functioning of the “criminal brain.” In the giddiness that surrounds this neuroscientific claim, which ranges from influencing legal decisions concerning guilt and punishment, to detecting the unconscious biases of potential jurors and identifying people who suffer from drug addictions, the brain is considered like a broken machine where ”the higher deliberative center of the brain seems to be disabled” and therefore, becomes warped and broken causing anti-social acts to be committed.

Yet the appearance of phrenological tools in a neuroscientist’s office is a noteworthy if unconscious statement, illuminating a dark and hidden history of which contemporary neuroscience may be a part.

From the late 18th century onward, physiognomists, phrenologists, and physical, medical, and criminal anthropologists believed in the idea of a distinctly criminal brain, seeking to identify it by locating certain anomalies or “stigmata” which were marks of atavism and could positively determine those who were “unfit” for civilized behavior. Brain weight, cranial measurement, and the detailing of the brain’s peculiar morphology were part and parcel of the scientist’s toolbox.

One of the most influential criminal anthropologists was Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) whose work had a profound impact on European and American studies of crime. Lombroso believed in the “born criminal” who could be identified by physical signposts of innate degeneration. He argued that the “The criminal by nature has a feeble cranial capacity, a heavy and developed jaw, a large orbital capacity…an abnormal and asymmetrical cranium, a scanty beard or none, but abundant hair, projecting ears, frequently a crooked or flat nose.” Consequently photographs of the” born criminal” and his/her features were routinely taken in prisons and asylums and were used in court as evidence of a pre-disposition of men/women deemed guilty of particular crimes.

The primary distinction between the biological determinist arguments of the Lombroso school and the absolute faith in present day neuroscience is the shift from the physical examination of gross specimens to the apparently miraculous technologies of brain-scanning. Both claim the finger of scientific certainty, without reference to recognition of the social, historical or moral environments that people inhabit. And both hold an unwavering faith in ostensibly objective science to prop up assertions that are blind to any force other than biological causation.

It is interesting and significant that as many in our society dismiss the value of social programs that are designed to improve conditions among the socially or economically disadvantaged as “wasteful,” they also embrace "scientific" theories that make the consideration of social causes and uneven playing fields irrelevant. Lack of concern for social improvement was also the rule in the America's "Gilded Age," when earlier (now discredited) versions of biological determinism were wholeheartedly embraced by ruling elites.

Neuro-conservatism is but the latest incarnation of a dismal history. Rather than publishing reverential encomiums to the wonders of neuroscience and its predictive powers, responsible newspapers should be assessing its history, its limits and its vast potential for abuse. These issues shouldn’t be left to those who write letters to the editor, most of which will never be published.

—Elizabeth Ewen
—Distinguished Teaching Professor
—SUNY College at Old Westbury

TWO EGGS OVER EASY.
Written by Rubén G. Rumbaut to
The New York Times, October 23, 1999

To the Editor:
Two decades ago the sperm of anonymous Nobel Prize winners was stored in an Escondido, California, sperm bank, offered for sale to would-be parents of genius children. Today (Carey Goldberg, “On Web, Models Auction Their Eggs,” October 23, 1999) an Internet site is auctioning the ova of gorgeous women to would-be parents of beautiful children. Both eugenic efforts seek to profit by appealing to the vanity and not the sanity of their clients—a sound bet in a celebrity culture.

But bidders might do well to recall the turn-of-the-century story of Isadora Duncan, the dancer, who once approached George Bernard Shaw [a fan of Eugenics—Editor], the brilliant playwright, with a similar proposition: “George, with your brains and my beauty, imagine the child we could produce!” “But Isadora,” replied a wry Shaw, “what if the child were to inherit your brains and my beauty?”

—Rubén G. Rumbaut
—Beverly Hills, MI

EDITOR’S NOTE:
According to the Times article, Ron Harris, a fashion photographer, was “offering up models as egg donors to the highest bidders, auctioning their ova via the Internet to would-be parents willing to pay up to $150,000 in hopes of having a beautiful child.” The article went on to report that Harris defended “the egg auction as a natural outgrowth of the urge that people have to mate with genetically superior people and produce babies with evolutionary advantages. That is particularly true, he said, in a society whose ‘celebrity culture.’ worships beauty.” We welcome letters that discuss the extent to which the mapping of DNA is giving rise to related developments in would-be parental thinking.

WOMEN SHOULD NOT BE IN THE
BUSINESS OF SELLING THEIR EGGS. Written by Evelyne Shuster, Ph. D., to
The Philadelphia Inquirer,
March 8, 1998

To the Op-Ed Editor:
A flurry of reports on the commercialization of human eggs has recently appeared in major newspapers. Within a week, five different articles in The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer have detailed the buying and selling of human eggs, and the increased demand for these “precious, perishable products, essential for baby making.” (Inquirer, March 8, 1998) The sudden realization of the importance of women in reproduction is surprising. But it is not a cause to rejoice. Women have always been in control of baby making. And this has been a curse more than a blessing. That which gives women control and power over reproduction has been the very reason why women have been discriminated against [and controlled in order to insure that a man’s child is “his own” —Editor]. Either too fertile or not fertile enough, the woman’s body has been a battlefield for new reproductive technologies. As the demand for human eggs—the “Holy Grail” of reproduction— increases, so too does the price, which has jumped to $5,000 from $1,200 just a short year ago. The traffic in human eggs completes the commercialization of reproduction, including the economic (and political) power over women’s breeding and the marketing of their sexuality. Should women be in the business of selling their eggs?

It has been argued that because men can sell their sperm, denying women equal opportunity with men in the commerce of their eggs is discriminatory. Yet the provision of sperm cannot be equated with the provision of eggs. The retrieval of eggs is painful, dangerous and medically risky. Women must take hormone injections daily to force the maturation of a dozen eggs, instead of the normal one or two eggs. They may suffer cramps, abnormal bleeding, enlargement of ovaries, mood swings, possibly compromise their own fertility, and face other unknown long term health risks. Her eggs, once matured, are suctioned out through a fine needle threaded from her vagina to her uterus. To impose the male sperm donor model on women is unacceptable. To give women the same rights as men in the business of selling their gametes would not redress gender inequality in reproduction.

Once eggs are retrieved and used for reproduction, the woman is never to be recognized as a parent with rights. Although she genetically contributed to the making of the resulting child, it is as if she never existed. Erased from the traditional family picture, she is a non-entity. By selling her eggs, she has in effect sold her babies, and denied her parents their genetic grandchildren. This is because society cannot deal with the fact that children produced with sold eggs have two mothers who biologically and genetically contributed to their making. Unless society comes to grips with the new ability to separate genetic mothrs from gestational mothers, and brakes away from the traditional two parent family system that defines the permitted and the forbidden, the licit and the illicit, and family ties for transmission of names and possessions, powr and control over reproduction will be simply sold to the wealthy by the poor. Such a crass commercialization of the human body has been forbidden in life-saving organ transplantation. It certainly should not be permitted in baby making. The commerce of eggs that develops at the fringe of the traditional family system, where only one set of parents I recognized and accepted, creates a process through which women as egg “donors” are objectified, depersonalized, degenderized, and excluded. Because the market of human eggs puts in place a system of exclusion that quietly, but forcefully, order women about, it should be outlawed.

—Evelyne Shuster, Ph.D.
—Philosopher and Medical Ethicist
—Philadelphia, PA