beijing

Geneticists throughout the world should engage more deeply in discussion with their governments on the implications of their work, and not stay aloof from such debates, one of the leading figures in the US Human Genome Project told an international meeting this week.

Maynard Olson, a professor of genetics at the University of Washington in Seattle, made his appeal in a plenary address to the Eighteenth International Congress of Genetics, which is being held in Beijing under the sponsorship of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Genetics Society of China.

The meeting is the third such congress to be held in Asia, after Tokyo in 1968 and New Delhi in 1983. The decision to hold it in China, which was made at the last congress, in Birmingham, United Kingdom, in 1993, has been controversial ever since China drafted a ‘eugenics’ law (see Nature 372, 123; 1994).

This law, which came into force in 1995, requires physicians to recommend couples to postpone marriage if one partner is found to have a series contagious or mental disease. Those diagnosed with a “genetic disease of a serious nature” are asked to take unspecified long-term contraceptive measures or to be sterilized.

After the decision to hold the meeting in Beijing had been confirmed, three national genetics associations — those in the United Kingdom, Argentina and the Netherlands — withdrew in protest from the International Genetics Federation (IGF), under whose auspices the regular international congresses are held, advocating a boycott by their members.

Other associations argued in favour of attending the meeting, and rejected the call for a boycott. But several did so only after they had been promised that the programme would include an open debate with Chinese geneticists about the Maternal and Infant Health Care law and the potential dangers of its rigid application.

Although the local organizing committee in Beijing subsequently agreed to a request from the executive committee of the IGF to include a symposium on eugenics, this has been broadened into a general session on the ethical, legal and social implications of genetics research.

However, it will be followed by an evening workshop on the science and ethics of eugenics, chaired by Anthony Griffiths, professor of botany at the University of British Columbia, Canada, the secretary of the IGF, and Renzhong Qiu of the Chinese Academy of Social Science.

The eugenics issue was not referred to in the opening ceremonies of the congress, which concentrated on its main theme, “Genetics — Better life for All”. The president of the congress, veteran Chinese geneticist C. C. Tan, emphasized how genetics can improve the quality of life, for example by helping to increase food production.

“With the world's population estimated to increase from 5.9 billion to more than 7 billion in 100 years' time, we face the question of whether the human species can sustain itself on Earth,” said Tan. “Food production has to keep up with population growth, and international cooperation is clearly indispensable in developing new plant breeding skills.”

Discussing the international implications of human genome analysis, Olson argued that it was wrong for geneticists or governments to spend too much energy on the relatively short-term issue of intellectual property rights over genetic material. “The issue that all countries should focus on is the development of their local scientific capacity,” he said.