A geneticist looks at contraception and abortion.

T HE PAST 15 or 20 years have seen the transmutation of genetics into biochemistry and the emergence of a new science of molecular biology. This discipline has greatly illuminated some of the most fundamental issues of human nature. It inevitably raises questions for that time when we modify the genotypes of human beings by principles already commonplace in the experimental genetics of microorganisms. Originally it had been my intention to discourse on these questions to contemplate how we might be able to cope with the issues that this awful knowledge which man has acquired might bring us. But in contemplating how I might discuss moIecular human bioIogy, it occurred to me that to dally on such questions would be an amusing and engaging futuristic escapism. We might then have to chide ourselves for using these issues to avoid facing up to some very cogent and very present problems about which physicians and biological scientists are still not sufficiently outspoken * and which result in an untold amount of human misery. And further, unless we are able to deal with these contemporary issues in a humane way, we will never in the future be able to cope with the subtler problems of qualitative intervention in the finer points of human reproduction. We have been through an era in which mystical conceptions of human nature have discouraged the distribution of information about contraception and family planning. The earth is laid open to an unprecedented crisis of misery because of the reticence 20 or 30 years ago of many informed individuals to speak out soon enough, vigorously enough, demandingly enough to reach the position and policy we take with respect to family planning today. I would like to remind you that not very many years ago “contraception” was a dirty word; it was impossible to refer to contraceptive devices in public media. Yet I don’t have to remind this audience what the total, miserable consequences of the delay in the imparting of knowledge of quantitative control of conception have meant and mean now throughout the world. It is even possible that the world will not survive as a habitat of the human species simply because of our reticence, because of our pusillanimity, in coming to face an issue about which every one of us here has long had all of the moral and biological facts.