Citizen Genetics

In their quiet, back-room study of the secrets of heredity, U.S. geneticists are developing many a technique as explosive as any nuclear physicist's dream. Last week, at somber meetings in separate cities, two geneticists brought current accomplishments and prospects into the open:

¶ Defective human genes, lab-mixed with healthy genetic material, may some day be artificially inseminated to produce normal individuals, said Johns Hopkins Biologist Bentley Glass in a Michigan State University lecture. Children's sex may one day be pre-ordered by a lab device that electrically separates the two types of sperm. "The great advances already made," said Glass, "suggest other fascinating possibilities of producing and modifying human genetic material."

¶ The world's undirected population explosion, concentrated among have-not peoples, hardly favors the groups "better fitted to direct man's future biological and cultural development," said Nobel Prizewinner George W. Beadle (TiME, July 14) at a Washington forum. Sure that men now have the skill if not the wisdom for "directing our own evolutionary futures." Geneticist Beadle raised an ominous question: "Can we go on indefinitely defending as a fundamental freedom the right of individuals to determine how many children they will bear, without regard to the biological or cultural consequences?"

To this musing, onetime (1941-45) Vice President Henry A. Wallace, hybrid-corn developer and gentleman farmer, added that population trends are indeed "ruining gradually though surely the quality of human life," plumped for hereditary records and genetic guidance "to enable intelligent young people to make free-choice the matings which will increase the genetic wealth of our planet." But such instruments would never, he said hopefully, "be used by any genetic Hitler."