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“... Nothing in contemporary science seems to trouble the public more than genetic engineering. Despite the cloying sentimentality that Steven Spielberg has introduced into Jurassic Park, the film expresses the sharp scepticism about the benefits of manipulating DNA that forms the moral core of the novel by Michael Crichton on which it is based. In the novel, Ian Malcolm, the conscience of the tale, remarks as he lies dying from a raptor attack (in the film he doesn’t die; only villains die on Spielberg’s screen): ‘Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself ...”

“... In 1944, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who had earned a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the invention of quantum mechanics, published What is life?, a remarkable book in which he argued that vital processes must obey the laws of physics but could probably not be reduced to them. In micro-physics, order tended to give way to disorder; the behaviour of single atoms could be predicted only in statistical terms ...”

“... and some of this shows in its analyses of eugenical selection – who should breed, who not. Kevles has gone on to be analysed by fellow academics, notably in the pages of the prestigious American history-of-science magazine lsis, where the doubts about his account of heredity and genetic engineering have been most strongly voiced: but astonishingly ...”

“... on fraud in biomedical research. The Congressman’s sensibilities were offended by the very idea: Kevles writes that Gore regarded fraud in the biomedical sciences as ‘akin to pederasty among priests’. Two New York Times science journalists – William Broad and Nicholas Wade – were outraged at what they saw as bland indifference to the problem on the ...”

“... justified its interest as being to study how the genome responds to radiation. At that point, as Daniel Kevles relates, biologists realised they were making a mistake, since control of the project would pass out of their hands. In the course of lobbying for their own patron agency, the National Institutes of Health, to be cut in on the action, they ...”

“... inevitable reproductive disappointment. For Galton these arguments were not entirely theoretical. Daniel Kevles has suggested that the barrenness of Galton’s own marriage (to Louisa Butler, herself the product of a distinguished academic pedigree, but no heiress), may have been responsible for his single-mindedness: ‘Galton may well have diverted ...”

“... than he dared be in print is proved by a passage in a book which Wellsians seem to have neglected, Daniel Kevles’s In the Name of Eugenics (1985). Discussing attitudes to mass forcible sterilisation in the early 1900s, Kevles records: In the United States, a strong consensus in favor of sterilisation – supporters ...”