cover image Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings

Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings

Gina Maranto, Gina Moranto. Scribner Book Company, $24.5 (335pp) ISBN 978-0-684-80029-5

In a provocative, richly informative report, freelance science writer Maranto combines a tough-minded, unsentimental look at the infertility industry with a historical survey of attempts to influence childbearing through forced sterilization, selective infanticide and control of mating. Eighty percent of attempts at in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer and other forms of assisted reproduction fail, she warns, and marriages are often destroyed by the rage, recriminations, stress and anxiety resulting from infertility treatment. Maranto skeptically views the modern science of manipulating sperm, eggs and embryos as a distant stepchild of the eugenics movement launched by English anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, who put forth a scheme of selective breeding for human betterment. She exposes the racist and anti-immigrant overtones of eugenics in the U.S., where dozens of states by the 1920s passed laws requiring compulsory sterilization of individuals deemed ""unfit,"" meaning diseased, dependent, delinquent, epileptic, blind, deaf or deformed. Maranto thoughtfully examines the ethical and legal issues surrounding surrogate mothers, egg donation and cloning of human embryos, an experimental technique that is expected to yield the world's first delivery of artificial twins within the next few years, unless it is banned by international law. She urges tighter regulatory controls to ensure that new reproductive technologies are not abused by those with misguided eugenic notions. Readers Subscription main selection; Library of Science alternate. (Aug.)