Bad Blood - 1. You’ve Got Good Genes

Seriously...

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.1 • 885 Ratings

🗓️ 23 December 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this 6-part series, we follow the story of eugenics from its origins in the middle-class salons of Victorian Britain, through the Fitter Family competitions and sterilisation laws of Gilded Age USA, to the full genocidal horrors of Nazi Germany.

Episode 1: You’ve Got Good Genes

Eugenics is born in Victorian Britain, christened by the eccentric gentleman-scientist Sir Francis Galton. It’s a movement to breed better humans, fusing new biological ideas with the politics of empire, and the inflexible snobbery of the middle-classes.

The movement swiftly gains momentum - taken up by scientists, social reformers, and even novelists as a moral and political quest to address urgent social problems. By encouraging the right people to have babies, eugenicists believed we could breed ourselves to a brighter future; a future free from disease, disability, crime, even poverty. What, its proponents wondered, could be more noble?

The story culminates in the First International Eugenics Congress of 1912, where a delegation of eminent public figures from around the world gather in South Kensington to advocate and develop the science – and ideology – of better breeding. Among them Winston Churchill, Arthur Balfour, the Dean of St Pauls, Charles Darwin's son, American professors and the ambassadors from Norway, Greece, and France: a global crusade in motion.

But amidst the sweeping utopian rhetoric, the darker implications of eugenic ideas emerge: what of those deemed 'unfit'? What should happen to them?

Contributors: Professor Joe Cain, Daniel Maier, Professor Philippa Levine, Professor Angelique Richardson

Featuring the voices of David Hounslow, Joanna Monro and Hughie O'Donnell

Music and Sound Design by Jon Nicholls Presented by Adam Rutherford Produced by IIan Goodman

Clips: Trump addresses a rally in Bemidji, Minnesota in 2020, C-Span / Trump on his German blood, Kings of Kallstadt 2014, directed by Simone Wendel, produced by Michael Bogar, Mario Conte, Inka Dewitz, Thomas Hofmann / Julian Huxley - Heredity in Man, Eugenics Society, 1937

Transcript

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0:00.0	This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box.
0:05.0	The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from.
0:09.0	And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape.
0:12.0	The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape.
0:12.5	The IRA inmates who found a way.
0:14.5	I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path
0:19.5	through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history.
0:25.0	The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them.
0:28.5	Escape from the maze, listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:35.0	BBC Sounds. BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:39.0	Hello, I'm Adam Rutherford and you're listening to Seriously from BBC Radio 4.
0:44.6	You're about to hear you've got good genes, the first episode of Bad Blood.
0:49.3	Eugenics is born in Victorian Britain. This is the story of an idea,
0:59.0	a powerful and troubling idea which is born in a Victorian quest for a better society
1:05.9	but reaches a horrifying climax in the death camps of Nazi Germany.
1:10.8	This is the story of eugenics, its dark history, and its troubling present.
1:17.0	You have good genes, you know that, right?
1:22.0	You have good genes, you know that, right?
1:23.0	You have good genes.
1:25.0	A lot of it's about the genes, isn't it, don't you believe?
1:30.0	The race source theory you think was so different, you have good genes in Minnesota.
1:34.0	The word eugenics comes from the Greek meaning well-born or of good stock but a modern translation might
	...

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