MY MOTHER told me to be wary of people out to do good. Always look for an
ulterior motive, she warned. Behavioural geneticists, it seems, are no
exception.

The genetics of intelligence and behaviour is a burgeoning area of research.
If you find that alarming, there is an army of “experts” jostling to allay your
fears. Take the National Institute of Mental Health in the US, which has set out
guidelines on the ethics of such research. Or Britain’s Medical Research Council
(MRC), which this year issued a consultation document, entitled Genes and
the Mind, asking the public what it thinks.

This unprecedented openness may not be all it seems, though. At a recent MRC
meeting at which grants for this type of research were discussed, one eminent
psychiatrist heralded it as an “opportunity to prove at last that psychiatry is
a science”. The research promises status and power for his discipline. If public
anxieties threaten it, the thinking goes, we’ll just pretend to discuss
them.

The MRC’s document aims to “ensure that the benefits of supporting the
research are understood”, “to present the facts behind some key potential causes
for concern”, and to promote these aims by teaching us the “rules of the road”.
In other words, they are going ahead regardless, and any opposition will be
swept under a carpet of facts.

The document is a PR job worthy of Tony Blair’s spin doctors. We, the public,
apparently need to be told what’s best for us. We can have a “consultation”, but
there is only one possible outcome: the progress of science.

The question is, is it really science? Biochemists talk of “mapping” the
human genome. Behaviour researchers who aspire to hitch themselves to the
biochemistry bandwagon are labouring under the illusion that their work meets
the same rigorous scientific criteria. To be real scientists, they believe that
all they have to do is lay a piece of tracing paper over the genetic map and
mark “depression”, “low intelligence” and so on at strategic points.

The biochemistry of the genome is like physical geography: evolutionary
change takes place over a vast timescale, comparable to continental drift. The
list of recognised cognitive and behavioural conditions, on the other hand, is
quick-changing—rather like a political map on which countries are
continually vanishing only to be replaced by new ones.

For evidence of this rapid evolution, you need look no further than the
definitive psychiatric handbook, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders. The manual (commonly known as DSM) has been
revised three times since it was first published in 1952. Attention
deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a label attached to children who are
inattentive or hyperactive, only made its debut in DSM-IV. Yet
psychiatrists identify the disorder with the same certainty as laboratory
technicians locate specific genes.

By contrast, hysteria featured in DSM-I, II and
III but has been dropped from the latest edition. If the human genome had
been mapped a generation ago, behavioural geneticists would certainly have been
looking for the genetic markers for hysteria, probably on the female sex
chromosomes. Hysteria was jettisoned, possibly in response to the growing
campaign for female equality.

But if you aspire to be a real scientist, you can’t change your conceptual
parameters just because you are scared of feminists. “Not all of the mind is in
the genes,” says the MRC’s consultation document, trying to distance itself from
genetic determinism. True, but it seems some genes are all in the mind and can
vanish overnight.

These behaviour researchers want us to accept their diagnostic boundaries as
if they were set in stone. If their diagnoses of mental illness were as
permanent as the genetic material on the underlying physical map, they could
point to a one-to-one fit between mental conditions and their physical markers.
But they aren’t, so they can’t. The result is their efforts to pinpoint genetic
causes are largely unscientific.

These consultation exercises are subtly dictatorial. They tell us what our
worries are before we have a chance to work out our genuine concerns. It is a
convenient way of suppressing proper public discussion.

We are afraid, they tell us, that research will lead to the genetic
engineering of behaviour and intelligence. Yet behaviour and intelligence have
so far eluded our attempts to manipulate them.

Take the history of Down’s syndrome, for instance: a mental disorder was
invented, a cause found (the extra chromosome), a prenatal detection technique
(amniocentesis) devised. Hey presto, the disorder is eliminated. For five
seconds it looks good. Yet the actual number of babies born with Down’s syndrome
is in fact increasing slightly. Humans are quirky creatures, not easy to
engineer. And researchers will be equally incapable of altering our genetic
make-up to treat less easily definable disorders.

Our anxiety should instead be focused on the medium-term damage to living
humans done by researchers in cognitive and behavioural genetics who talk about
“intelligence” and “behaviour” as if they were scientific concepts. What is
intelligence, and what is normal behaviour? Who should decide? On these crucial
questions they are silent because they want to be members of the club that does
the deciding. What they are doing is not science but political manipulation
under another name.

ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s are used to sociologists and historians telling them that
science is invented rather than discovered. At the ‘softer’ edges of science
this can, no doubt, be tolerated. For example, some medical scientists may
be prepared to throw a psychologist or two to the sociological wolves, and
agree that the definition of madness depends on how you look at it. But
here comes someone who apparently wants to say that mental handicap or ‘retardation’
is invented, too. Does James Trent, a professor of sociology in the US,
really mean there’s no important difference between the professor of paediatrics
and the child whose profound intellectual handicap he teaches his students
to diagnose?

Trent’s book deals with the history of institutional care and control
in the US. Although served well by doctoral theses, this is not an area
adequately covered by published books, and Trent’s is an excellent starting
point. He talks us through from the early practitioners, the sterilisation
programmes and eugenic theories of this century to the abandonment of residential
institutions in the past decade.

He is aware of the temptations of talking about ‘progress’. Rather,
he writes about mental retardation as a construct whose changing meaning
is contextualised within the social, economic and political order of the
US. Nevertheless, as in so many works which talk about invention and social
construction, Trent tries to have his cake and eat it. Sometimes the mentally
retarded person is a pure invention. There is the case of Mayo Buckner,
committed to an institution in 1898 and found, in 1958, to have an IQ of
120; and then there is Trent’s observation, no doubt true, that ‘high-grade
imbeciles’ were unnecessarily press-ganged into the institutions in order
to provide free labour to maintain the ‘low-grades’. But if only one group
are in the literal sense ‘invented’ as mentally retarded, that merely reinforces
the uninvented intractability of the others, thus encouraging the discrimination
and control that the author ostensibly seeks to criticise.

As for the current order, Trent sometimes talks about mentally retarded
or ‘intellectually disabled’ people as if he accepts that such a condition
really exists. On the other hand, ‘in neighbourhood groceries, it has become
a familiar sight to see people working who most of us once labelled mentally
retarded. Many of us have gotten to know them and have developed close friendships
with them.’ Trent contradicts himself by suggesting both that mental retardation
is a mere label with no real meaning and that the label simply needs to
be swapped for a less offensive phrase. But if it is true that mental retardation
is only a social construct and thus open to abuse, then smiling at the people
who stack your supermarket trolleys seems an inadequate response to the
outrages that continue. Because they are set apart, ‘special’ schools are
by definition centres of abuse – quite apart from their shocking history
as such, which Trent relates.

We now have another problem: genetic screening programmes are much more
effective than the prewar eugenic practices of which he gives such a chilling
account, and are equally locked into the utilitarian economic criteria and
paranoid imaginations of medical science: the proliferation of professional
privilege in Trent’s history has been overtaken by the blind development
of medical technology. His account of the 19th-century scares about mental
retardation among US immigrants finds reflection in modern practices. For
example, in Britain medical scientists are routinely carrying out prenatal
screening of the offspring of first-cousin marriages between Pakistani
Muslim immigrants. It takes only one morbid (and scientifically counterintuitive)
connection between ethnicity and sexual reproduction, and the genetic police
spring into action with their latest weaponry.

The feeble-minded can be invented this way or that way, or they can
be invented, full stop. As long as we do not know which of these two approaches
to adopt, these savage practices can be prolonged indefinitely.

Chris Goodey teaches for the Open University, Milton Keynes.