The Genomics Revolution in the Shadow of Auschwitz: Eugenics, Genism, and Genetic Genocide
The Genomics Revolution in the Shadow of Auschwitz: Eugenics, Genism, and Genetic Genocide

Summary/Abstract: Genetics is often viewed as a potential medical savior not just through personalized medicine in the developed world, but also by applying genetic technology in the resource-poor world. But there is a dark side to genetics that often escapes attention. This dark side reached its depths in Auschwitz, where Foucault’s biopolitics, the government’s power to make live, intersected with the government’s historical power to make die. The fundamental division was seen as between people and populations in which, as Giorgio Agamben has noted, a political body is transformed into a biological body whose entire life, from birth to death, must be regulated. The 1933 Nuremberg laws “on the protection of the hereditary health of the German people,” Agamben notes, “marks the caesura perfectly... citizens of Aryan descent are distinguished from those of non-Aryan descent... [deploying] a new biopolitics of racism.”

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