(From "Matilda..." in H. Belloc (1940/1964), Selected Cautionary Verses, London, Pelican)

THE rather domestic imagery about Matilda, afflicted with the gene for lying, seems appropriate at this juncture - the Human Genome Project promises to become a household phrase and has already destroyed some hometruths. A distraught aunt in the pre- HGP era might, at the least, have tried to trace the original sinful ancestor responsible for her niece's deadly gene.

Consider also the possibility that with the "findings" of the HGP, there will be fewer baleful statements like "she has got the gene for arguing from her mother" and unconvincing ones like "he has got the gene for a sunny temper from his father" - we are told that there is no one-to-one correlation between genes and personality traits. Admittedly, that makes bad news for mathmatecian/athlete/musician parents: any future chips of the old blocks would not have an unfair genetic headstart, and would have to drudge it out like everybody else. Did we not all hear the announcement that genes make Proteins, not People?

It is, however, not in the snug domestic sphere, but in the public arena that the implications of the HGP results are important. They proclaim resoundingly the inherent democracy, as it were, of the genes themselves - scientifically speaking, there is no genetic basis for the concept of race, either. This, then, seems an appropriate moment to unbundle some of the roles that genetics has been associated with in human societies in the not too distant past.

Part of the reason why we believe that "there is a gene for this and a gene for that" is not because the science of genetics ever proved it, but because there is a whole history of political practice which derived legitimacy from this science. We are collective inheritors, in other words, of the faulty gene of "commonsense" beliefs which we thought had a scientific basis. Many of them still reverberate. Fortunately for the future of human species, the worldwide corpus of commonsense arising out of the science of genetics is only about 100 years old. It was around the end of the 19th Century that Charles Darwin's celebrated cousin Francis Galton coined the word "eugenics", which literally meant good genes, or well born.

Widely publicised genes of various hues miraculously soon came into existence - for criminality and intelligence; for physical handicaps and mental illnesses; for sexual promiscuity and alcoholism and, much to the satisfaction of policymakers, for pauperism, idleness and illiteracy. One study, disapproving of loud and talkative people, duly identified a defective gene responsible for "loquacity". (Just three decades ago, an American geneticist worked among the "genetically untainted" Brazilian Yanomanis, convinced that a "leadership gene" could be located within the community. (He determinedly collected hundreds of blood samples - strictly, only, of men).

But to return to the majestic role ascribed to science in the making of not just desirable individuals, but in the building of genetically spottess societies. Though steeped in the Darwinian doctrine of "survival of the fittest", eugenics was actually not a science, but a social programme of "racial improvement" through selective breeding of the human species. In the early 20th Century, numerous Eugenics Societies and Racial Hygiene organisations sprang up all over the world, committed to improving the national genetic stock. Though Great Britain, the United States and Germany are notorious as Eugenic enthusiasts, a host of countries - Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and Canada (with a large number of indigenous people); imperial France, Italy and Japan and to a lesser extent, Finland, Austria, Norway and Sweden - had eugenics movements of their own.

The history of eugenics has many chapters, some more painful than the others. If judged on the basis of sheer human suffering caused in the name of racial purity, the Australian case remains second only to Nazi Germany. The authorities began by identifying, on the basis of colour, "half caste" children (the progeny of aboriginal women and white, absconding, fathers). As a part of State policy which ran from early 20th Century upto the 1970s, such children were abducted from the aboriginal community, and brought up in isolated orphanages. The aim was to "cross them with pure whites" over several generations. The child targets of these grotesque policies suffered in unimaginable ways, but from the point of view of the State, the final aim of "breeding the colour out" was at least partly achieved - thousands did graduate from being half caste to quarter caste to becoming white in the end. These traumatised and shattered people, now called the Stolen Generations, have sued the Australian State for compensation, and demanded that an official apology be made to the aboriginal people.

How precisely did a common version of social sanitation, underwritten by the theory of hereditary genes, actually work in practice? Imagine a "multiracial" (i.e. multicultural) society in the first three or four decades of the 20th century: in its ghettoes, not one, but several of the undesirable genes were seen to be dangerously clustering. The carriers of such genes almost always happened to be poor, illiterate and unemployed - more often than not they were also unwanted immigrants, or people of colour. For the policy makers, urban slums became conglomerates of polluted racial stock and criminal genes; IQ tests (designed by the privileged and judged by the prejudiced) confirmed the gene for feeble mindedness.

Governments anxious to guard the national genetic pool began by tightened immigration laws which forbade entry to "inferior racial groups" - the U.S. government, advised by its geneticists and biologists, led the way in the 1920s. Some administrations formulated legal marriage restrictions between people of colour and whites, or isolated in prisons those with polluted genes. But the most dramatic contribution from Eugenics came in a single, widely practised solution: mass, forced sterlisations to contain the errant gene/s which would have produced physically unfit, criminal, dull-headed, poor, illiterate and idle individuals.

The German Rassenhygiene (or racial hygiene) programme, incidentally, also started with mass sterilisations of criminals, the mentally inadequate/ill and physically incapacitated people. (A look at just one instrument of the paraphernalia to identify the victims - the questionnaire for the "intelligence test", failure to pass which invited the charge of feeble mindedness - would send shudders down the spine of a contemporary.) These groups were targeted regardless of their race, so as to prevent future genetic tainting. The Nazis were, however, soon emboldened into killing millions of the self-evidently inferior races, gypsies and Jews along with inmates of hospitals and prisons.

The genocide in Germany by the Nazis was, then, only the ultimate form that pseudo theories deriving from genetics could dictate. Blaming every undesirable social phenomenon upon defective genes or inferior races allowed policy makers to shrug off responsibility for the weak and the vulnerable in the short term; the Darwinian principle of "survival of the fittest" went further, and justified their elimination.

The HGP represents a historic milestone in scientific advance. It is wonderful to have today's geneticists pronouncing that we are all born equal - may it help to reverse the tide of a whole history of indignities and discrimination, of death and mayhem perpetrated in the name of a pseudoscience. But the Eugenics programmes did not just draw their inspiration, but also their legitimacy from the science of genetics. Looking back, what hurts most about this lurid historical phase is that on the part of the "genetically correct" members of these societies, supporting Eugenics programmes was widely seen to be synonymous with a high degree of personal responsibility and national pride. Innumerable distinguished scientists - geneticists, biologists, doctors and psychologists - lent their names to Eugenic and Racial Hygiene organisations and helped in running of the actual programmes.

We are poised at a historical juncture when genetics potentially holds in its hands the future of the entire human species. As genetic engineers, we are all set to mock and defy disease, to attempt to even cheat death. Together we must watch out that capacity for such mastery does not lead to unleashing new hierarchies, new grounds for inflicting suffering. The old ones in any case would not go away just because their scientific basis has been demolished in some laboratory.

It is time to begin to accept, and value, the genuine differences that nature willed to make each of us unique individuals. Time, also, to take responsibility for the unequal world that not nature, but we ourselves built. The occasion of the marvelous findings of the HGP must remind us that once upon a time science could be turned into a peg on which to hang our social prejudices. The human part of the history of science, too painful and too frightening, insists that we do not allow it to be ever repeated again.

E-mail: meena.rkna@vsnl.com