Author Saini cites university's eugenics probe in calling on scientists to acknowledge inherent lack of objectivity in their work

A recent report by a world-renowned university about one of its former fellows' efforts to revive the debunked pseudoscience of eugenics highlights a problem in the scientific community: that too many scientists believe they can keep political views and prejudices out of their work, a prominent author wrote.

According to a Feb. 28, announcement, University College London recently completed an examination of its support for eugenics, a discredited pseudoscience – and found that there is still $1 million in the university’s coffers that have been linked to Francis Galton, who founded the Eugenics Records Office at UCL in 1904.

The report calls for removing Galton’s name and that of another geneticist from buildings and lecture theaters, but it fails to acknowledge the fact that yesterday’s mistakes still inform current science, said Angela Saini in a March 9 column in the journal Nature.

Saini is the author of “Superior: The Return of Race Science." Her 2019 book examined how modern-day geneticists look at eugenics and what else needs to happen to make science better. 

“In  failing to recognize that science can be political, the scientific community allows the resurrection of dangerous ideas. Acting as if theories – especially those about humans – exist in cultural or political vacuums is a ridiculous fallacy,” Saini said.

UCL’s inquiry started after a 2018 discovery that a former honorary fellow had been booking meeting space for secretive conferences discussing race and eugenics. 

The problem with the inquiry, Saini said, is that many believe it didn’t go far enough to connect the past pseudoscience and current attempts to keep it alive.

Also in February, Dominic Cummings, a special adviser to the UK Prime Minister, hired an aide with eugenicist views. Andrew Sabisky had suggested that conception be required to halt the growth of a “permanent underclass,” Saini wrote. Sabisky has since resigned. 

Saini has covered the UCL inquiry and found that more staff and students in sciences and engineering believed that science and politics should be separate. She also found that the university’s humanities scholars were the ones who pushed their workplace to examine its history, not to overlook it. She highlighted curator Subhadra Das and historian Joe Cain. 

Where scientists prefer to keep science and politics separate, believing themselves able to prevent political viewpoints from influencing their thinking, it’s easier to separate the past from present studies. This, Saini said, is especially true when "science" was inherently political to begin with, as with eugenics.

“The UCL survey also revealed that members of the university community who are disabled or from minority ethnic backgrounds are more likely to feel that the legacy of eugenics is still present than are those who are white and not disabled,” Saini wrote. “The people on the receiving end of the worldview that drove eugenics understand how alive it remains.”

She calls on scientists to admit that they don’t know everything and to admit when there is a lack of objectivity. 

“The best research is done not when we pretend that we are perfectly objective, but when we acknowledge that we are not. The UCL inquiry report recommends that students and staff be exposed to the history of eugenics and that students be encouraged to value the history of their own fields,” Saini said. “I would go further. Scientists need both history and the social sciences to develop the intellectual tools to think critically about their research and how it affects society. This isn’t just helpful – it’s vital.”