His work as an interpreter of science for the general public has brought many rewards, the first of which is a body of work that includes the autobiographical “Disturbing the Universe” (1979), a meditation on nuclear disarmament, “Weapons and Hope” (1984) and a road map for the most important technologies of the coming century, “The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet” (1999). Dyson’s writing has been widely praised for its poetry and artistry, and in 1996 he received the Lewis Thomas Prize, a Rockefeller University-sponsored award that recognizes scientists for their artistic achievements. The key to Dyson’s life is that he has never been one to shy away from new experiences. Recalling that his real life began at age 45, when he published his first book, Dyson mused in 1992: “So long as you have courage and a sense of humor, it is never too late to start life afresh.”

Born in 1923 in Crowthorne, Berkshire, in south England, Dyson grew up as “a mathematically inclined child born into a musical family … without pretensions to scientific fame.” The Dyson home was rich in cultural and artistic influences. His father, the composer/conductor Sir George Dyson, eventually became the director of the British Royal College of Music in London. Dyson’s mother, Lady Mildred, a lawyer by training, was intensely interested in literature and language. Dyson recalls that his parents expressed their affection by encouraging him to explore arts and culture; they were in their early 40s when they started their family: “[Being raised by my mother and father] was more like being with grandparents than parents, but they certainly loved us in their own fashion. It was more intellectual than physical.”

Missing from Dyson’s boyhood home were scientific influences, until the family adopted one — Sir Frank Dyson, Astronomer Royal. He was no relation to the Berkshire Dysons, but he was from the same part of Yorkshire as Sir George Dyson. In his 1992 book “From Eros to Gaia,” Freeman Dyson recalls that the breakfast table discussions between his father and other relatives about Sir Frank’s exploits heavily influenced his early interest in astronomy and spurred him to take up his pen as a 9-year-old and write a novel based on the activities of Sir Frank.

The unfinished manuscript of “Sir Phillip Robert’s Erolunar Collision” is at once a snapshot of the astronomical events of 1931 and a window into a future project that would occupy a good portion of Dyson’s professional ruminations: space travel. It’s also a good satire of large-scale science projects. In 1931, the orbit of asteroid Eros was going to pass close to the Earth, providing an important opportunity for astronomers to get an accurate reading of the distance between the Earth and the sun. In the incomplete novel, Sir Phillip, director of the British South African Astronomical Society and a character based on Sir Frank, successfully predicts an Erolunar collision by calculating the orbit of Eros 10 years and 285 days in advance.

Dyson turned to one of his science-fiction heroes to help the plot along. The characters decide to rewrite the mission described in Jules Verne’s “From Earth to the Moon and a Trip Round It” to change Eros’ destination to go directly to the moon and land the astronomers on its surface to witness the collision. Then reality crept into Dyson’s fiction: The astronomical society needed money. Sir Phillip spends the final pages of the manuscript trying to raise funds and design a spacecraft. The novel ends before Sir Phillip can leave Earth.

The unfinished novel proved prophetic. That obviously bright and perceptive 9-year-old grew into a scientist who would consult for NASA and work on numerous government-related projects. In the end, the grown scientist would come away with an opinion that was eerily close to that of the aspiring science-fiction author: that large, bureaucratic-run scientific endeavors often exist to justify their own importance. Dyson assessed his early views in “From Eros to Gaia:” “These observations show that the practice of science has changed less than one might have expected between 1933 to 1991.”

Dyson’s adult journey began with a stint in the Royal Air Force’s bomber command in World War II, a role the Gandhian pacifist took after giving serious consideration to being a conscientious objector. After two years in the service, Dyson attended Cambridge University where he completed a bachelor of arts degree in theoretical mathematics in 1945. In 1947, he made his first trip to the United States to Cornell University to serve a scientific apprenticeship at the elbows of the some of the greatest minds in physics.

Cornell in 1947 was the center of a renaissance of pure physics research, born of the ideas and concepts that had lain dormant during the war. One of the chief orchestraters of this rebirth was Dyson’s graduate advisor, Hans Bethe, a future Nobel Laureate who spent the war years working on the atom bomb at Los Alamos. Bethe brought other former Los Alamos scientists to Cornell, including Richard Feynman, a young professor of physics who would help influence the course of Dyson’s career.

Feynman was then working on a private version of quantum theory that would later become the standard method for making calculations in particle physics. It is a credit to Dyson’s scientific acumen and personable nature that Feynman and the other physicists accepted the young graduate student as a colleague straight away. When Dyson wasn’t hard at work on a physics problem Bethe had given him, he was part of a coterie of faculty and grad students ministering to Feynman. By spending a lot of time around Feynman, Dyson got the opportunity to observe the physicist “at the height of his creative powers.” Dyson understood Feynman’s work well enough that he was able to do something Feynman couldn’t: write about the theories for a broader audience, a skill Dyson would develop into a second career.

Dyson’s work at Cornell was short; his program lasted nine months. But during his studies at the Ithaca campus, he raised many philosophical questions for which his advisor had no answer. Philosophy questions in physics were the bailiwick of another one of Bethe’s former Los Alamos colleagues, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was then director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Bethe spoke to Oppenheimer about Dyson, and Dyson was off to Princeton in the fall of 1948 for a year of post-graduate work at the Institute for Advanced Study.

Dyson impressed the legendary Oppenheimer enough with his work that he earned a long-term membership to the institute. Dyson also met his future wife during this time. They married, settled into Princeton, and started a family that grew to six children. By 1953, Dyson had earned an appointment as a physics professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, a position he held until his retirement in 1994.

After becoming a U.S. citizen in 1957, Dyson caught wind of a fascinating project taking shape near the sun-kissed beaches of San Diego. The Orion Project would allow Dyson to marry his boyhood fascination with Jules Verne to his desire to use his mathematical training to solve an interesting problem: Is it possible to create a propulsion system that will allow man to explore the entire solar system for a politically acceptable cost? Orion provided the most exciting and happiest times of Dyson’s scientific life, mostly because he became an engineer, a being apart from a scientist. He noted the difference in “Disturbing the Universe”: “There are no prima donnas in engineering. In Project Orion … nobody was working for personal glory … It did not matter who invented what.”

Orion was born at the General Dynamics Corporation, the progeny of several former Manhattan Project scientists and Dyson, all of whom were anxious to find a more noble and peaceful use for nuclear power. Under Orion, a vehicle much larger than Apollo (perhaps as big as a city) would be propelled into space by several repeated nuclear explosions. The craft would carry a large supply of bombs and the requisite machinery for throwing them out at the right time and location.

Dyson saw so much promise in this project that he predicted to writer John McPhee that they would put men on Mars by 1965 and on Saturn by 1970. Unfortunately, Orion met the same fate as Dyson’s fictional Erolunar mission: It never made it to the launch pad and was declared dead in 1965. In his own post-mortem of the project in a 1965 Science article, Dyson attributed Orion’s demise in part to politics over funding and by the scientific community’s disdain for engaging in anything related to engineering. But mostly, Orion was scrubbed because the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 outlawed it. Proponents of the treaty, he said at the time, didn’t give Orion a chance.

Eventually, Dyson’s own position on nuclear test bans would change: He grew to believe that if the U.S. were to stop nuclear weapons testing and production, it would reduce incentives for the Soviets and others to pour time and money into developing their own weapons. In the early 1960s, Dyson become a staff member of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, where he took part in test ban negotiations. Later in the decade, Dyson chaired the Federation of American Scientists, an organization founded in 1945 as the Federation of Atomic Scientists by former Manhattan Project scientists, including Oppenheimer, for the purpose of addressing the dangers and implications of the nuclear age. Dyson later struck an intellectual balance between opposing views: He became a champion of anti-nuclear activists, understanding at the same time why the government military machine would dismiss the protests.

In his 1984 work “Weapons and Hope,” Dyson explained the military’s stance toward the anti-nuclear movement with a story from his own childhood. At the age of 7, he took part in a group teasing of a younger child. His mother admonished his actions by telling the young Dyson: “You do things together which not one of you would think of doing alone.”

Dyson translated his mother’s lesson to fit what he believed was happening between the military and anti-nuclear activists: “Wherever one looks into the world of human organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards. The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things together which nobody in his right mind would do alone.”

What sets Dyson apart among an elite group of scientists is the conscience and compassion he brings to his work. One of his specialties is in the field of adaptive optics, work with mirrors that can, in theory, allow a ground-based telescope to see objects as clearly in the sky as a space-based telescope. Dyson understood the dark side to adaptive optics — that the technology used peacefully by astronomers could be used by military to focus laser beams on satellites, aircraft and other targets. Before beginning his work on the optics, Dyson studied both the peaceful and the military applications and determined that the latter death ray scenario was more the stuff of science fiction than reality. To this day, Dyson’s work is enabling astronomers to make successful observations.

Dyson is so well-known for his theories about taking Jupiter apart to build a star-bound biosphere (known throughout science fiction as a Dyson Sphere), that it’s easy to overlook his physics work, which would earn him worldwide recognition — membership in the national science academies in three countries including the United States — and numerous scientific awards, including the 1994 Enrico Fermi Award, given by the U.S. government for excellence in physics. For his own part, Dyson takes a whimsical view of his place in science. He told Omni Magazine in 1978: “It’s amusing to think that someday all my ‘serious’ work will probably be a footnote in a textbook, when everybody remembers what I did on the side.”

One could look at Dyson’s life and see it as a series of threads, each representing a project he has taken up on the side, all woven together to tell his story. The latest thread concerns Dyson’s role as an author, writing about the aesthetics of science and explaining the philosophical and theoretical issues involved in scientific endeavors ranging from nuclear research and space travel to solar power and genetic engineering. In each of his books and articles, Dyson intersperses scientific explanation with meditation on humanism and how the human condition affects science, and vice versa. One of the most eloquent examples of this is in “Disturbing the Universe,” where he examines the motivations behind the political actions of the chief architects of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller:

Oppenheimer was driven to build atomic bombs by fear that if he did not seize this power, Hitler would seize it first. Teller was driven to build hydrogen bombs by the fear that Stalin would use this power to rule the world. Oppenheimer, being Jewish, had good reason to fear Hitler. Teller, being Hungarian, had good reason to fear Stalin. But each of them, having achieved his technical objective, wanted more … Each of them became convinced that he must have the political power to ensure that the direction of the enterprise he had created should not fall into hands that he considered irresponsible.

Dyson is a credible analyst because he is a man who has tasted war, having served in the British military while wrestling with his conscience over the morality of war and all that goes with it. In making his observations, he thinks with his heart and hands, qualities he values as an essential part of sound scientific inquiry. This thinking is also an essential part of art. So it is no surprise that Dyson equates scientific inquiry with craftsmanship. Perhaps this is the self-styled frog’s greatest legacy: to be down in the mud, engaging in the tactility of life as a human who happens to be a scientist.

The suit charges the FDA with violating the very federal statute that created the agency, the U.S. Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, because the FDA does not mandate the testing and labeling of GM foods. For its own part, the FDA asserts in its policy on GM foods that genetically engineered crops are no different than those created through traditional breeding methods. The agency bases its position on the fact that foods derived from traditionally bred crops have a history of safety. Thus the FDA takes the position that genetic engineering is just another traditional breeding method, and reasons that GM foods should be considered safe.

Whatever the judge’s decision, Druker’s actions have made public information that is very damning to both the FDA and the companies selling GM seeds simply because it highlights the central point in the controversy over GM foods: No one has proved beyond a doubt that GM foods and other products are not safe, nor has anyone proved beyond a doubt that these products are safe.

By now, most everyone in the U.S. has probably eaten GM foods in some form. According to the Biotechnology Industry Organization, genetically engineered crops accounted for 25 percent of the corn acreage planted in the U.S. in 1998, 38 percent of the soybean acreage and 45 percent of the cotton acreage. Because the FDA makes no distinction between GM crops and traditionally bred varieties, food producers are not required to separate or label their GM crops in the U.S. So without knowing it, you’ve probably eaten GM soybeans in the breakfast cereal you had this morning, in the chocolate bar you knoshed on this afternoon, and perhaps your baby has had it in his soy-based formula.

The very notion that people are eating foods derived from GM crops without their knowledge — or consent — offended Druker both as a lawyer and as a religious person when he realized this was happening back in 1996. He came upon this information while researching a book examining the relationship between science, religion and ethics. The more he researched, the more he became concerned about genetic engineering and the basic assumptions government regulators were making about the products of this science. Eventually, the 50-year old lawyer set aside his book and took up the cause of suing the FDA.

While he awaits the summary judgement of his lawsuit, Druker has kept a pretty packed schedule that has included an appearance before a panel selected by the FDA to discuss the safety and labeling issues of GM foods. Ironically, the agency has taken Druker’s arguments more seriously than much of the news media. What has made Druker’s lawsuit noteworthy to many editors is that it contends the FDA’s policy on GM foods infringes upon religious freedom rights and is in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

This focus on the religious angle has had the effect of putting Druker in a camp with the anti-establishment fringe, a characterization that has stuck. In an Aug. 18, 1999, profile of the lawsuit, the Wall Street Journal covered only the religious aspects of the action, describing Druker as something of a small-town, Torah-thumping fanatic who was “gathering his Noah’s Ark of plaintiffs, many of whom share his mystical spirituality and distrust of authority.”

To be sure, 12 clergy leaders from a variety of established denominations are co-plaintiffs in Druker’s lawsuit — along with nine university scientists. Druker says the university scientists and the clergy leaders were each aware of both the religious and scientific aspects of the lawsuit before signing on. The religious aspects are important, Druker says, but have been overblown. The overriding concern of both clergy and scientists is that the FDA’s handling of GM foods has been unethical.

The lawsuit seeks to force the FDA, at the very least, to label GM foods, to inform consumers of the genes that have been inserted in their foods so they can make a informed dietary decision. At most, Druker and the others would like to see a recall of these products and mandatory testing. To achieve even part of their goals, Druker and the CTA counsel must prove that the FDA has not followed the law to ensure the safety of consumers regarding GM foods.

Druker and the CTA may have already won the war, even if the battle is still undecided. As part of the lawsuit, the FDA was required to turn over to Druker some 44,000 internal documents. These include memos from agency scientists criticizing the FDA’s developing policy on GM foods.

The policy, which was published in the Federal Register in May 1992, is regarded even by the FDA’s own scientists as an industry cheat sheet: “The initial intent of the document was to present scientific considerations and to avoid telling industry what tests to run and how to go about doing it,” said Louis J. Pribyl, an FDA microbiologist in a February 1992 memo.

Yet a major part of this policy is a flowchart that effectively tells a company not only what to test in a crop but what results will be needed for the product to be considered safe. By including the flowcharts and telling the companies what to test and what results to get to meet safety standards and by listing all the tests and the answers, Pribyl felt that the FDA made it possible for companies to tailor their tests to get the results they would need.

Prior to Druker’s lawsuit, evidence that FDA policy was written largely to favor industry was a set of loosely connected dots. Besides the published policy in the Federal Register, there were Bush administration statements about the FDA regulations between 1991 and 1992. Vice President Dan Quayle in particular said the policy was part of a “regulatory relief program” that was intended to ensure the dominant position of the U.S. biotechnology industry.

And finally, there was a special investigation by the General Accounting
Office, the investigative arm of Congress, of the FDA in 1994 that focused on potential conflicts of interest regarding several agency officials who had once been employed by the agro-pharmaceutical
corporation Monsanto. Chief among the targets was Michael Taylor, whose job it was at the FDA to oversee and approve the very policies that would regulate GM products. Prior to joining the FDA, Taylor was a partner at King & Spalding, Monsanto’s external counsel on regulatory issues. The GAO report found no improprieties on Taylor’s part. But the document did make the connection between Monsanto and one of the main authors of FDA policy.

Now, with the newly disclosed FDA documents in Druker’s hands, the holes in this picture are filling in. The published policy is based on the idea that genetically engineered crops are no different than those created through traditional methods. Yet in previously undisclosed FDA memos, at least 10 of the 17 scientists who took part in shaping the Federal Register document along with other FDA researchers invited to comment — including head scientists from the agency’s Division of Food Chemistry and Toxicology, Center for Veterinary Medicine, Biological and Organic Chemistry Section — cast serious doubts on the scientific evidence for this assumption.

As Linda Kahl, an FDA compliance officer, noted in a memo dated Jan. 8, 1992, the FDA’s approach to writing the policy was the equivalent of “putting a square peg in a round hole — are we asking the scientific experts to generate the basis for this policy statement in the absence of any data? It is an exercise in hypotheses forced on individuals whose jobs and training ordinarily deal with facts.”

Even the FDA official with approval authority over the policy, Biotechnology Coordinator James Maryanski, raised questions about the agency’s assumptions. In a letter to a Canadian government official dated Oct. 23, 1991, Maryanski acknowledged that there was no scientific consensus about the safety of GM foods. He also admitted that the potential for genetic engineering to introduce new compounds into foods that could trigger allergic reactions “is particularly difficult to predict.”

In these documents, Druker and the CTA counsel believe they have proved that the FDA disregarded warnings of many of its own scientists about the unique risks posed by genetically engineered foods; that it covered up these opinions; and took a public stance that was entirely the opposite in tone and message than the private, internal memos.

In October 1999, the FDA announced a series of meetings around the country to discuss the safety of GM foods. Maryanski, who participated in these panels, asserted, “We are meeting our goal of ensuring that these new products meet the same safety standards as traditional foods.”

One model GM product that agency officials like Maryanski hold up as proof of the safety of GM foods is the Flavr Savr tomato, but the new memos have bruised the product’s reputation. The Flavr Savr tomato was engineered to ripen slowly, to give tomatoes a longer shelf life. It had to undergo more stringent food testing because its developer, California-based Calgene, had applied for market approval prior to the enactment of the FDA’s new policy on GM foods.

In 1994, Flavr Savr failed as a consumer product because all the genetically engineered advantages were lost in the shipping and packing stage, which bruised the tomatoes and gave them an aged appearance. According to an FDA internal memo, Flavr Savr also failed to meet the agency standards of safety.

In an assessment that went to Maryanski and others, Robert J. Scheuplein, director of the agency’s office of special research skills, found a problem with some of the testing data on the Flavr Savr. Scheuplein was unsatisfied with the explanations of Calgene scientists about one difference between regularly bred tomatoes and the Flavr Savr.

Although he regarded the effect as small, Scheuplein did say: “The data do not show the Calgene product to be unsafe but the data fall short of ‘a demonstration of safety’ or of ‘a demonstration of reasonable certainty of no harm’ which is the standard we typically apply to food additives.”

With regard to how the agency was instructing its scientists to regard GM foods in testing, Scheuplein said, “It has been made clear to us that this present submission [the Flavr Savr] is not a food additive petition and the safety standard is not the food additive standard. It is less than that, but I am not sure exactly how much less.”

The chilling implication revealed in this memo is that all other GM crops have undergone less stringent testing. In fact, testing is handled not by the agency but through voluntary consultations between the companies and the FDA with company scientists running the tests.

Previously undisclosed papers such as these tell the story of how the FDA flouted its own laws and ignored the advice and warnings of its own scientists in the process of pushing through a food technology that seemed to have immediate benefit only for the producers — namely agrochemical companies including Monsanto, DuPont and Novartis.

The ramifications stretch far beyond the U.S. borders. Together, these documents with the resulting FDA policy confirm the very fears expressed last November by WTO protesters in Seattle: that globalization will lead governments to speed up industry growth at the expense of thorough public health precautions. This is precisely what has happened with GM foods.

“Before Druker, we had no hard evidence that our regulatory system was favoring industry,” explains Gabriela Flora, program associate on Agricultural Biotechnologies, at the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

By connecting the dots between U.S. regulators and industry, the hard evidence from the Druker case along with public outcry could put the breaks on the once fast-moving industry that the U.S. government has tried so hard to foster. Already, GM crop producers are reeling from partial and complete bans of GM crops throughout the European Union and Asia.

And in the U.S., where GM food fights have paled in comparison to sentiments expressed by Europeans, the tide is turning. Major food producers like U.S.-based Archer Daniels Midland have cut back on the use of GM foods or agreed to segregate and label these foods in their exports to Europe. The recent failure of the WTO negotiations, which were intended to reduce trade barriers, has forced the Clinton Administration to step back from its goal of broadening markets for GM products.

“People from the U.S. Trade Representative’s office stand up and say we have the safest food supply and the strictest regulation in the world, but Druker is showing this isn’t the case,” says Flora. So countries that once questioned the integrity of the U.S. food supply and the integrity of U.S. regulators now have ample ammunition, thanks to Druker, to prevent GM foods — produced mainly by U.S. corporations — from entering their borders.

It is somewhat remarkable that an individual such as Druker would eventually have such an impact on the high-stakes development on the GM foods industry. As he describes it, his involvement began with a simple realization of serious ethical concerns. “What I could see was that there were plans to very quickly restructure a large percentage of the world’s living organisms and that the U.S. government had given it a green light,” Druker says.

In fact, a large community of government officials and scientists — including Gordon Conway and Gary Toenniessen of the Rockefeller Foundation — seemed to hold the same, favorable view. Druker said he was surprised to find that “these presumptions appeared to be dubious to eminent scientists who were not indentured to the biotech industry.” Druker sought out these scientists, many of whom hold faculty positions at some of the most prestigious universities in the U.S. and Europe — including the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University and the University of Leeds.

Before long, nine of these same scientists became plaintiffs in Druker’s lawsuit. What makes their action unusual is that the atmosphere inhabited by molecular biologists and other scientists engaged in biotechnology research is a clubby one. Dissenting views about genetic engineering are discouraged, says Phillip Regal, professor of ecology, behavior and evolution at the University of Minnesota.

Regal is one of the plaintiffs in Druker’s lawsuit. Having a negative view of biotechnology, Regal warns, can cost a researcher his chances at tenure, future employment in industry, and certainly can dry up his resources for research funding. The scientists joining Druker in suing the FDA have done so at great personal and professional risk.

Why are these scientists and Druker doing this? Because they take issue with the way in which the government, corporations, and a significant portion of the scientific community, appear to speak with one voice. That one voice consistently tells the public that the industry must move forward quickly to preserve the U.S. dominance in biotechnology. At the same time, it tells us not to worry — government and industry have already taken care that public health and the environment will not be endangered as we move forward with this technology.

By suing the government, Druker feels he is getting at the major source of the biotechnology juggernaut. The publication of these documents, which Druker has gradually added to the Alliance for Biointegrity Web site since last summer, will have the effect for biotechnology that the tobacco papers had for the cigarette industry: Others will gain ammunition that can be used in later litigation and export restrictions on GM foods.

So in many ways, Druker has already won even before the final judgement is in on his case. “[The FDA memos] are out, and they can never be covered up again,” he says. “If we cannot turn the tide against genetic restructuring within the bounds of science and law, perhaps economic realities will come into play.”

Economic realities have struck. Last month, Novartis and AstraZeneca announced plans to spin off and then merge their agricultural businesses into a new company called Syngenta and Monsanto followed suit nearly two weeks later with Pharmacia Upjohn. The message in these moves is clear: The companies have taken enough of a financial bath with their investments in GM products and are, in a way, washing their hands of these ventures.

Already the laboratory had IQ test scores for Vivian’s mother Carrie and her grandmother Emma which found the women to be “morons.” Adding the “data” about Vivian’s looks to the mix was enough to establish that three generations of the Buck family were of low intellect. These facts became the basis of a landmark 1927 Supreme Court decision that allowed states to forcibly sterilize people who carried “hereditary defects.” Carrie Buck was forcibly sterilized, and by the mid-1930s, about 20,000 people in the United States met the same fate under similar laws.

Vivian Buck’s story, along with various state sterilization laws, are among the artifacts that will soon be on the Web as part of a digital image archive chronicling a dark chapter in U.S. history — the American Eugenics Movement. The movement, which began in 1904, was a government-sponsored social engineering project which sought to improve the human species by encouraging “fit” people to marry and procreate while sterilizing and prohibiting unions between the “unfit.”

The Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement is expected to go online in January 2000. Judging from a preview, it’s a pretty powerful site, featuring a collection of troubling documents and pictures. There are photos of men arranged as if in a police line-up, which purport to show correlations between the size and shape of one’s head and one’s intelligence; there is a photo of a young boy just out of diapers who was identified as a likely potential criminal — a determination based on the shape of his face. There are family trees which track alcoholism and idiocy across the generations; and there are photos of the “fittest families” — who apparently evidenced no undesirable traits.

Up to now, the materials of the eugenics archive, which had been dispersed among several institutions including the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, have remained an obscure body of research, accessible only to scholars. By granting broad access to the archive over the Internet, David Micklos, director of Cold Spring Harbor’s DNA Learning Center and chief architect of the eugenics archive, hopes to encourage students and the general public to make a connection between what happened in the early 1900s and events in genetic research that are grabbing headlines today — a connection that could provide an ethical context for some agonizing decisions we face in our personal lives and in society. Clicking through some of the shocking images and articles of the exhibit, I was struck by a disquieting common ground shared by eugenics and today’s prenatal genetic testing: a belief that biology is destiny and that science alone can help us overcome it.

The goal of the eugenics movement was to create the best society possible. Eugenics relied on the state-of-the-art genetics of its day, although the vast body of information that became the basis for sterilization, marriage and immigration laws aimed at weeding out those with “bad heredity” was based largely on anecdotal information. Field researchers at places like the Eugenics Record Office collected hereditary data through house-to-house surveys and the study of records of prisons, hospitals and institutions for the deaf, blind, insane and the mentally disabled. Today we have a lot more accurate information — scientific data about the structure of DNA and its proteins, which paints a detailed picture of how traits are inherited. And many of us — believing that technologies like prenatal genetic screening yield results that are reliable enough for us to use as the basis for life-altering decisions — are using this information to create the best children possible.

If you scoff at the notion that a child’s future academic prowess was once thought to be determined by the fact that his or her grandfather was a drunkard, then consider that today we don’t even flinch at the idea of controlling our own procreation. In fact, we expect to pay a lot of money to engineer the “perfect baby.” Witness the advertisement placed in the student newspapers of Ivy League schools by an infertile San Diego couple last year. The ad offered $50,000 to college-aged women in exchange for their eggs. The couple, by selecting to advertise only to the Ivy League, was clearly looking for a particular kind of woman’s eggs, and they were very specific: Potential donors had to be at least 5-foot-10, possess a combined SAT score of 1400 or higher, and show some athletic prowess.

Then there’s the more recent case of Ron Harris, the Arabian horse breeder and fashion photographer who reportedly opened up a Web site for the purpose of auctioning off eggs and sperm of fashion models to the highest bidders. The price of admission to this little exercise is a fee of 20 percent of a the final bid on egg or sperm, and for that, you have the comfort of knowing that, “our striving reflects the determination to pass every advantage possible along to our descendants.”

“I guess the question I ask about this is why buy such a specific egg,” posits Paul Lombardo, professor at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia and a leading scholar of the Vivian Buck case. “I understand that couples are infertile, but [through ads like this], they’re not just looking to have a baby, they’re looking to have a special baby with special features they’ve picked out.”

Why buy a specific egg? Don’t we want the best for our children? Developments in reproductive and genetic science coupled with the age-old desire to give our children every advantage possible has led us to a point where we feel we are more responsible for our offspring at an earlier age — even before we conceive them. Of course, it’s common knowledge that smoking and drinking alcohol can harm a developing baby, and a lot of women are aware that taking folic acid before and during a pregnancy decreases the chances of birth defects; these are the eat-your-broccoli type measures that any woman can take. But where we begin to cross the line from common-sense health choices to scientific control comes with procedures like prenatal genetic tests.

Prenatal genetic screening is designed to look for specific diseases such as Down syndrome and is recommended to women whom doctors determine to be “at risk.” Just who is “at risk” is a decision that is made on based on results of preliminary blood tests and anecdotal and demographic information a pregnant woman gives her doctor. A woman’s race, age and the diseases that have existed in her family and that of her mate’s are among the facts used to determine the risks of producing a baby with a disease or disability. For example, risks for certain inherited diseases like Tay Sachs or sickle-cell anemia vary depending upon the race of a woman and her mate. So if a woman or her mate are Jewish, then she is likely to be screened for Tay Sachs.

The discussion between doctor and patient regarding prenatal tests often start off with the open-ended question: How do you feel about genetic testing? In the abstract, who could quibble with having more information about her developing baby? But when you’re pregnant, wearing nothing but a hospital gown, and lying with legs agape on an examination table, this question can stir panic. That panic comes from the implicit message delivered by doctors when they advise patients to have these tests: Should the baby turn out to carry a disease or defect, intervention — in the form of in utero surgery or even abortion — is often advised.

With prenatal genetic testing comes a small chance of triggering a miscarriage. At the same time, certain results, like tests for cystic fibrosis, can generate more questions than answers. Cystic fibrosis, a fatal, inherited illness where the body produces large amounts of abnormally thick mucus that accumulates in the lungs and intestines, is known to biologists as a single-gene disease. This means that having the gene would mean that someone would have the disease. But someone who carries the gene for the disease might never show signs of cystic fibrosis. That’s because the genes themselves don’t bring on the disease, says Garland Allen, a professor of biology at the Washington University St. Louis. The expression of the genes depend on other factors such as environmental triggers, Allen says.

Such ambiguities are not generally part of the discussion when doctors steer their patients toward having these tests. If you waver when asked the general, “How do you feel about testing?” question, then the doctor might ask, “What if,” as in, “What if the baby has Down syndrome?” And if you’re still waffling, and if you happen to have a child already, you might be asked, “What about your child? How will a Down baby affect your family?” This conversation hits a pregnant woman in her most vulnerable spot — her heartfelt concern for the health of her developing baby and the overall well-being of her family. And some doctors make their opinions about this clear: To undergo the tests is to fulfill a duty to do all that is possible to ensure a baby is healthy; to refuse the tests is to shirk responsibility.

What may feel like a coercive atmosphere to some pregnant women certainly doesn’t compare to the collusive agenda of the eugenics movement, but it has similarly insidious consequences. The pressure to rely on science today is brought to bear on one patient at a time, and with the intent of ensuring the health of both mother and child, while the eugenics era was marked by a country-wide belief that everyone had a responsibility to do all that was possible to improve society, says Cold Spring Harbor’s Micklos.

Groups like the American Eugenics Society cropped up all over the country after 1910, developing campaigns and sponsoring state fair exhibits to raise awareness of the importance of eugenics. The archive shows photos of billboard-type advisories in which flashing lights called attention to “facts” such as: Every 15 seconds $100 of public money goes to the care of “persons with bad heredity,” and that every seven and a half minutes, “a high-grade person is born in the United States … with the ability to do creative work and be fit for leadership. About four percent of all Americans come within this class.”

One irony today is that technology like genetic screening is being sold to us as a way of making our lives easier by reducing our chances of having to care for disabled children. Yet one need only to look at the subject lines of postings to chat boards such as Parentsoup.com’s Genetic Tests and Complications to understand the stress that these tests can cause. “One in 31 [spina bifida or other neural tube defect test] result and scared,” posts one woman. “Low [spina bifida] at 17 weeks and scared to death — help!” writes another. Those yet to take tests or receive results, often ask “What if it’s bad news?”

And this begs the question, how reliable are these technologies and what are the risks involved? There’s the recent story of Nancy Seeger, the Chicago-based writer and artist who found through genetic tests that she was at increased risk for developing breast and ovarian cancer. Seeger looked at her family history with cancer — her mother and aunt died of breast cancer — and, with the advice of doctors, opted to have her ovaries removed. At the time of the surgery, Seeger donated some of her blood for study at a university hospital. Eight months later, doctors studying Seeger’s blood found that she did not carry mutation of the gene for breast and ovarian cancer. The company that administered her genetic tests made a mistake.

The truth about modern genetic science is that the very information used as the basis for life-altering decisions like having your ovaries removed or life-ending decisions like aborting a cystic-fibrosis-carrying baby is not always conclusive. This is not to say that all genetic testing is bad. Despite the confusion and stress they cause, these tests and the medical interventions they enable have helped countless parents have healthy babies and others to avert a cruel illness. Instead, the stories of Nancy Seeger and the women on Parentsoup.com serve as cautionary tales of what we can lose in relying on science alone to make crucial decisions.

And therein lies the biggest lesson of the eugenics archive. The movement reached its zenith during the years that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory operated the Eugenics Record Office, between 1910 and 1940. But by 1940, the laboratory shut down the Eugenics Record Office because the science that was used to make the various laws was discredited. For evidence of these shortcomings, one need look no further than the extensive records of the case of Vivian Buck. Among the images of the IQ tests and the observations of 7-month-old Vivian is an artifact that came a few years after the 1927 Supreme Court decision: Vivian’s grade school report card. This record shows that Vivian’s teachers found her to be bright. She had a solid B average, which proves that she was far from the imbecile that the high court found her to be.

Certainly, science and technology have ways of making our lives better. But they also make our lives harder, simply by giving us more options — which sometimes lead to hard choices. So it’s inspiring to see the Internet come to the rescue with something like the eugenics archive — to put us in touch with history and force us to think about where science has taken us and where we need to go next.