The views on eugenics of Sir Gustav Nossal, who was the director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for 30 years, have come under scrutiny in a new book called Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne.
In most surviving reports, Nossal is quoted as outlining what might become scientifically possible in future, but without endorsing any specific policy. The university’s vice-chancellor, Prof Duncan Maskell, has said the book is “part of a wider process of truth-telling”. A year later he told a Fabian Society symposium at the Kew Town Hall in Melbourne that one answer to the proliferation of genetic diseases was for mankind to practise what a report in the Age called “some effective and acceptable form of eugenics”.
“In fact, much recent writing on eugenics stresses instead the value of negative or remedial eugenics … the identification of human genetic characteristics that are positively harmful, and medical counselling that points out the risks involved in the possessor’s becoming a parent.” Dhoombak Goobgoowana also discusses other academics connected to eugenics, including Nossal’s mentor and predecessor at WEHI, Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet. Burnet, who won the Nobel prize for medicine in 1960 and was the first person named Australian of the year, argued that there should be “appropriate incentives to influence people with grossly harmful genetic defects to have few or no children”.
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