UCLA Programs in Medical Classics explore the links among famous medical writings, clinical practice, basic research, and humanistic scholarship in the context of the history of medicine, as well as the relations of medicine to broader cultural settings.

May 15:Genetic Screening is not Eugenics and It Never Was—Ruth Schwartz Cowan, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania.

Using “evidence based bioethics,” Professor Cowan will argue that the connection that critics make between medical genetics and eugenics is fallacious. Activists on the political right are as mistaken as activists on the political left: Genetic screening was not eugenics in the past, is not eugenics in the present, and, unless its technological systems become radically transformed, will not be eugenics in the future.