Conference On Genetics And Violence Worries Some Groups

Are some kids born to be bad? Can there be a “treatment” to block them from murder?

The explosive questions are back. The more explosive answer, in some quarters, is yes. And the renewed debate is sending chills down the spines of those who fear it will bring a Brave New World of mind-control to the children of America’s violent inner cities.

Simmering for decades, the issue owes its latest revival to a University of Maryland conference opening today on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay about an hour east of Washington.

Sponsored in part by a $100,000 grant from the Center for Human Genome Research within the National Institutes of Health, the conference for the first time will gather scholars from a wide array of disciplines to discuss the ethical implications of current research seeking a genetic foundation for violence and other criminal behavior.

Authors of the research and their supporters say it is hardly a sinister pursuit.

“Almost every day you’re hearing about a gene for this and a gene for that. If you can have a gene for obesity, it certainly can become acceptable that a gene can be involved in violent behavior,” said David Comings, a medical geneticist at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte, Calif.

And, like the famous fat gene, genes that code for violence are unlikely to suggest a quick-fix pill to sedate kids in the ghetto.

“All the genetic research done to date would suggest that if you wanted to go out and do something in the next year to have a concrete dent on crime and violence, you would do something to change the environment,” said Gregory Carey, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Carey last year authored a review of studies into the heritability of violence for the National Academy of Sciences.

“I would be surprised if there were any biological remedy,” Carey said.

Critics, however, get the willies whenever anyone tries to make the vast panoply of human behavior dance on the head of a gene. For them, the research raises the specter of Nazi eugenics, the science of breeding people - or eliminating them - in quest of a superior human race.

More to the point, critics say, what do you do if you find a gene that predisposes its owner toward violence?

“Suppose you do find out that 20 percent of criminal behavior is due to genes. What would you do?” asked Garland Allen, a historian of science at Washington University in St. Louis.

“There’s no technology for doing gene therapy” - that is, replacing the defective gene. “That’s pie in the sky,” Allen said. “So right now, the only thing you can do is say, well, we’ll drug people. We’ll give them drugs.”

In a sense, Allen is right. A growing body of research shows that criminals often possess a slightly altered brain chemistry. Genes appear to combine with traumatic life experience to reset brain chemicals, and the most promising avenue of treatment is drugs.

“What other solution do you want?” asked Ray Jeffery, a criminologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee. “There are issues out there that are biological.” With effective drug treatment, “perhaps we can stop building prisons and start building prevention programs.”

But wary critics foresee far more frightening possibilities: Compulsory genetic screening. Involuntary sedation. Forced sterilization of people who bear the genetic stain.

And who is the likely target? At a time when a best-selling book argues that black Americans are born with genes that make them less intelligent than whites, when blacks are arrested for nearly half of all violent crimes while making up only 12 percent of the national population, when black men are eight times more likely to die by violence than white men, it’s easy to see who might be nervous.

“The whole mood of the country is we’ve been too kind to black people, and it’s time to cut off their money and get tough with them,” said Maryland psychiatrist Peter Breggin, a perennial thorn in the side of researchers seeking medical solutions to inconvenient behaviors.

“To hold a conference on the issue of genetics and crime is really to hold a conference, from the American viewpoint, on the genetics of young black men and crime. The African-American community should be here en masse” in protest, Breggin said.

Three years ago, black leaders were indeed on the case, and original plans for this weekend’s conference were scrapped. Although conference organizers intend to scrutinize genetic research into violence rather than promote it, the original meeting was the victim of terrible timing.

A few months earlier, Frederick Goodwin had been discussing a new offensive by the Bush Administration against the root causes of violence. Called the Federal Violence Initiative, the idea was to launch an unprecedented effort to identify kids at risk for committing mayhem and provide therapy to prevent it.

As director of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration, Goodwin was to head the initiative. But during a meeting of the National Mental Health Advisory Council, Goodwin began talking about certain monkey populations in which males kill other males to get a better shot at the females, with whom they then engage in copious sex.

Calling these male monkeys “hyperaggressive” and “hypersexual,” Goodwin mused that “maybe it isn’t just a careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles.” Then he threw in the idea that perhaps “genetic factors” could spot kids who are especially prone to violence.

In the firestorm that followed, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and other members of the Congressional Black Caucus demanded Goodwin’s head. He was reassigned and later left the government. Groups sprang up in Detroit and other cities to keep the hands of the Violence Initiative off their children.

The program was abandoned, but elements survive. Precisely what kind of government studies continue is unclear. Federal officials deny that any government research on violence employs genetics. But Goodwin conceded in a New Yorker article that the Violence Initiative likely would have employed drug therapy.

Amid escalating charges of racism came the University of Maryland conference. Nervous NIH officials pulled its funding.

Conference organizer David Wasserman fought back and federal funding was restored for this weekend’s meeting.