Showing results for "History" in Genetic

How did an obscure academic idea pave the way to the Holocaust within just fifty years? Why does eugenics still loom large in the 21st century, despite its genocidal past? Did eugenics work? Could it work? Or was it always a pseudoscientific fantasy? Throughout history, people have sought to...

2017 Audie Award Finalist for Non-Fiction The #1 NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller The basis for the PBS Ken Burns Documentary The Gene: An Intimate History From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a fascinating history of the gene and “a magisterial account of how...

In the early 1800s, a century before there was any concept of the gene, physicians in insane asylums began to record causes of madness in their admission books. Almost from the beginning, they pointed to heredity as the most important of these causes. As doctors and state officials steadily lost faith in the capacity of asylum care to stem the terrible increase of insanity, they began emphasizing the need to curb the reproduction of the insane. They became obsessed with identifying weak or tainted families and anticipating the outcomes of their marriages.

Our understanding of diseases have dramatically changed over human history. Early civilisations believed health and disease were directly caused by the gods. This is why priests and priestesses were also healers and doctors. The ancient Greeks introduced the four humours theory, namely that the body was composed of four fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Disease and illness were caused by imbalances. Treatment was to rebalance these fluids.