DS: The most astonishing aspect of life on this planet is its incredible variety. Even within a species, any species if you know how to look, variability and difference are the rule. They're the evolutionary basis of change and adaptability. We humans have used this variation by applying a profound insight, like begets like to breed plants and animals to serve our needs. However, our drive to control doesn't stop with non human life. Armed with the new tools of molecular biology, we're turning our efforts towards engineering human life. But do we really know what we're doing when we tinker with an organism as complex as a human being?

DS: The barren woman, one of the oldest curses extending back into biblical times. Here at the Married Trees, she performs the ancient ritual and prays for a child.

DS: The desire for children is one of our most fundamental impulses. We're here, because our forebears followed that impulse and had children. Reproduction is complex, and much can and does go wrong. In fact, sometimes it seems nothing short of a miracle that most of us are born sound in body and mind. In a remote village in Southern India, a young woman is about to give birth . Don't get up, wait for two contractions. And then you can get up.

Unknown Speaker: Rest your hips on your heels. Make sure your hips are on your heels.

DS: Over the last nine months. Ungamal has actively awaited the birth of her child. She has followed the prescribed rituals and observed the taboos to ensure that her baby is healthy and strong. With the aid of a midwife and the accumulated knowledge of generations of women, she is entering the final stages of labor.

DS: Evolution has programmed each step of this process into her body, and it is from these signals that everyone takes their cue.

DS: A minimum of interference, allowing nature to take its course.

DS: This baby has survived not only birth, but the perilous journey from conception to this moment. Biological reproduction is an extravagant affair. Out of billions of sperm, only one will fertilize an egg, out of all conceptions, half will fail to implant in the womb, out of those that do less than half will be born. Nature ensures that what is healthy survives.

DS: Now that the cord is severed, she is no longer supported by her mother's systems, she's on her own.

DS: The next few days are critical.

DS: Less than an hour after birth, and already holding her own. In this society, she will not be considered a complete human being for 10 more days. This is a time when all of her survival mechanisms must come into play. If a flaw should claim her life during this period, she would be given a simple burial. In many countries with high infant mortality, this period of grace exists, the number of days may vary, but the effect is the same, accepting the sifting out of unhealthy babies and preparing to cherish the healthy ones.

DS: After the ritual bath, a traditional chant. May she have a long life as plentiful as the grains of rice. But if that is not meant to be, let her die now. Evil influences are said to feared dirt. Dust taken from the doorstep protects the child for the first 10 days.

DS: On the 10th day, her name is said out loud for the first time.

DS: Now, she is a fully fledged human being. For the first time, she has placed in a sari cradle, having passed the critical period of nature's testing of our systems.

DS: In our technological society, there is no period of grace. Everything is done to save babies, even those born months early. The great success of science and technology in decreasing infant mortality has has spurred on the impulse to intervene and control. Prematurity is an indication that something has gone wrong. Preemies are not ready to live on their own, and they have a larger share of all congenital defects. But once we intervene, it seems we have no choice but to respond to the consequences of that intervention. When a 600 gram preemie can be saved, a 400 gram baby must be considered. Where once nature established the boundaries, now we set our own.

DS: Long before there was a science of genetics, people knew a great deal about reproduction and heredity. We may not recognize this body of knowledge, because it's deeply embedded in the mythology and rituals of different cultures. But the people of those cultures, these insights may be just as valid as our scientific and technological information. To the Yoruba of Nigeria for example, abnormal births have become very important in their society. This shrine is one of 1000s where rituals are performed regularly to reaffirm the spiritual power of twins. 

DS: The arrival of twins in a Yoruba family is a cause for celebration. In other cultures, twins are greeted with mixed feelings, even eliminated in the interest of the community's well being. But the Yoruba value any birth that is out of the ordinary, and what people value they protect and nurture. Nigeria has the highest incidence of twins in the world. Could it be that through their ritualized attention to twins, the Yoruba have inadvertently encouraged and increase their numbers.

DS: Parents of twins consult a diviner, the babalao, who will read the signs and reveal the destiny of the children.

DS: He tells the mother that twins needs special care and must be fed special foods.

DS: The Deity has foretold good fortune for the children and they will have good fortune in all likelihood, because they are twins born in Nigeria.

DS: Each of these dolls represents a dead twin. The infant mortality rate in Nigeria approaches 50% and twins are fragile in the best of circumstances.

DS: When a twin dies, the parents fear he will lower the remaining twin away with him. And the baby doll is carved and cared for at home like a living child even fed the twin foods of beans and palm oil to ensure the continued well being of the other twin and the rest of the family.

DS: It is the custom for mothers of twins to go to the market and sing for money. Twins are expensive, two have everything.

DS: Twins have the power to bring good or bad fortune. So people feel obliged to be generous. In this weigh, everyone shares the burden of an extra miles to feed.

DS: In a tropical country where dark skin is essential protection from the sun, albinos are at an extreme disadvantage. In such an inhospitable climate, evolution should have selected against them. But in Nigeria, they have flourished. Like twins, they are held in high esteem.

DS: This family had the great good fortune of having three albino girls among six brothers and sisters.

DS: They were doubly blessed because two of them were twins.

DS: Every year, the Yoruba gather for a festival in honor of their twins, but it hasn't always been so. Like many societies, they used to consider twins and evil omen and put them to death. Today, they celebrate.

DS: Know one knows when or why the Yoruba began revering twins. Apparently, almost overnight, one attitude was chased out by its complete opposite. What was desirable or undesirable was purely arbitrary. To the Yoruba, a birth that is out of the ordinary signals a special conjunction of the cosmic forces that shape their lives. In other words, they believe the baby must be important, because God and the Spirit World have determined that it'd be born. So they attach a unique significance to abnormal babies, most strikingly, in the cult of twins. And with their extra care and effort, the Yoruba may have encouraged the reproduction of unusual traits, because they value these differences, something that has not been shared by people in other times and places. 

DS: The 20th century burst upon us in an atmosphere of optimism and hope. Propelled by the ideas of Darwin, people believed it was possible to improve themselves physically, mentally, creatively. Through a new science of genetics, it was thought traits harmful to society could be eliminated. An idea which proved useful to certain groups in power.

DS: But it was in America that these ideas had long found a comfortable home. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," America beckened. From Southern and Eastern Europe, came the largest response. Fearful of the waves of foreigners that inundated their shores, America passed restrictive immigration laws in 1924, with quotas favoring those of Nordic blood. They foresaw their own healthy stock, corrupted by other races.

DS: At Ellis Island, and other points of entry, immigrants, often malnourished and exhausted from the voyage, were subjected to rigorous physical examinations. intelligence tests were administered in English, a foreign language to most. It's hardly surprising that many failed. Between 1890 and 1954 12 million people came through Ellis Island, a quarter million were turned back. The successful candidates were to become the next generation of Americans. They had waited patiently dreaming of a better future for their children.

DS: The America that welcomed them, was taken up with a new cult, eugenics, the science of breeding better people. The natural order that Darwin had proclaimed, inspired this slogan, survival of the fittest. Now at last, differences seen within society could be explained through biology. By studying and classifying physical traits, scientists claimed a better understanding of behavior. Science, they said, showed that criminality, chronic unemployment, mental worth, were inherited distinctions. A person's place in the social order was seen to be genetically determined. Now nature herself was made an accomplice to inequality. By the 1920s, eugenics had become a popular movement at country and state fairs, concerned citizens launched public education campaigns to teach people about heredity and prevent the degeneration of American blood. Eugenics laws were introduced, calling for the sterilization of criminals, sexual deviance, and the feeble minded. In many states, interracial marriages became a crime. Prizes were given to better families, encouraging them to reproduce, positive eugenics.

DS: Negative eugenics, preventing the breeding of those who were perceived as inferior by any means. Eugenics and racism seem to go hand in hand.

DS: The laws passed in America to regulate the hereditary quality of its people served as the model for German racial purification.  "Over the last 70 years, our population has increased by 50%. While in the same period, the number of people suffering hereditary diseases has increased by 450%. If this continues, then in 50 years, one in four people will be genetically defective. The laws preventing those with hereditary diseases from reproducing must not be seen as an invasion of a God given right. But just as the reestablishment of a law of nature." 

DS: This then, was the Aryan ideal, the future master race.

DS: In the 1930s, German scientists, many world leaders in their fields created a climate that led to a Nazi eugenics program of planned reproduction. The preferred father's, the S S, and elite corps of perfect specimens.

DS: Women were just as carefully selected, there was no higher goal to which a German maiden could aspire than to contribute to the next generation of the 1000 year reich. A grand scheme was conceived and executed by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, state runs stud farms, the Lebensborn.

DS: Beginning in 1935, Lebensborn homes were set up throughout Germany and Austria. They served three functions, a place to rendezvous with the SS, a place to await the birth of a child, and a nursery.

DS: Between 1936 and 1945, an estimated 12,000 babies were born in the program. The imperfect ones were eliminated at birth. Within 30 years, it was calculated Lebensborn babies would provide for 600 regiments. Instead, they were to become children in limbo, without a future, without a past.

DS: A special ceremony dedicated the babies to the third right. The Lebensborn society was financed by leading industrialists, bankers and members of the aristocracy. But as with all other Nazi activity, the chief source of financing was money and property expropriated from Jews.

DS: From all over Europe, men, women and children of Jewish heritage were rounded up. Along with homosexuals, gypsies, and mental patients, Jews were seen as contaminants of threat to the abstract goal of pure blood. Negative eugenics demanded that they be sterilized and eventually eliminated to make room for the new master race.

DS: The science of genetics was full of promise to improve the human condition. But in the context of racism, it ended by legitimizing the mass slaughter of innocent people.

DS: It would be a terrible mistake if we were to dismiss the Nazi death camps as an aberration of one madman and his fanatic followers. Race purification and improvement was state policy and widely supported. It had been expounded for decades, not just by third grade intellect, but by some of the leaders in the scientific and medical communities.

DS: The bright promise that eugenics held out to us ended in horror. Sobered by the Nazi experience, scientists shifted in their assessment of the nature nurture question. For parents raising children after the war, the environment, not heredity, was considered to be the primary factors shaping human behavior and ability. Recently, the pendulum has swung back to an emphasis on heredity that coincides with new insights into genetics. It seems the prevailing social climate strongly influences what we select as scientific truth.

DS: This is Darren, his mother is Afton Blake, a clinical psychologist, his father, computer scientist, number 28, in a catalogue of anonymous donors to the repository for germinal choice, better known as the Nobel Prize sperm bank. Its purpose is to increase the intelligence of the American people, based on the belief that intellectual abilities are passed on through the genes.

Afton Blake: The first choice that I used, who was a Nobel Laureate, when they defrosted the sperm, they found that the motility rate was not sufficient to guarantee a satisfactory insemination. So I had to give him up and go to my second choice. The donor I ultimately chose was a classical musician, as well as a scientist all the all our donors are scientists. Also, he enjoyed the same sports that I do. These are sports that are not considered competitive. He also had 2020 vision and I have very poor vision. So that I thought that would be nice to give my child a chance not to have to struggle with glasses or contact lenses, whatever it might be. I believe that each person should be allowed as much quality of life as possible. And I think most of us in our own ways to choose this one we choose our spouse, in the more conventional family you're looking you usually you're looking for success, for intelligence, for good looks for healthy body. You're looking for some of these things anyway, but you Don't call it that. And then when you have your children, you really want them to be bright and you want them to be healthy. And, and that's, you know, that's in a form eugenics, if you think about it.

DS: The Nobel sperm bank is relatively primitive compared to the possible scenarios you eugenesist envision for the future. Geneticist James Bonner, California Institute of Technology.

Steven Gould: From each child of birth, we take a sample of their sperm or egg cells, put them in a liquid nitrogen deep freeze, and leave them there and sterilize a child and let the child live out his life. Then after the child is dead and gone, we have a committee meet and evaluate that person's life and determine whether we would like to have more people like that. And if we don't, we take the eggs or sperm out in some way. And if we determine that we would like to have more people like that, we take a thus selected egg and fertilizer by other selected sperm and develop it into a blastocyst and then implant that into a receptive uterus. Because we don't know how to grow babies and test tubes yet. So that's how we do it. It's not, it's free of emotion, it's not emotionally charged. The selection is made without the person being alive anymore. I think it's excellent. 

Steven Gould: It would be totally outside the bounds of permissible morality only to allow certain types of people to breed in any way. I think we value the enormous diversity of humans and there's no way to specify the tall people or short people or black people or white people are better than any other so on what criterion could you possibly judge who it is you wanted to populate the future human race so it isn't that you couldn't do it? It's just that double problem today it's immoral and be there's no criterion whereby you can specify who's better.

Unknown Speaker: I don't think we can be trusted to decide what is desirable and undesirable and human beings. We haven't been able to do it with an organism as simple as wheat, or rice. We now have interference in these fields has caused as much grief and anguish, as it has given us cheap and tasteless food. And I think we can't be trusted at all. I think we should hasten slowly.

DS: And hastening we are. The opaque womb, mysterious receptacle for the first nine months of human life is now transparent.

DS: A centimeter of amniotic fluid holds the biological portrait of the child to be. Amniocentesis, prenatal test to detect abnormalities allows us to decide whether a baby will be born or not. The gender of the fetus is revealed in the chromosomes, useful information when looking for sex linked diseases, and useful in countries like India and China, where amniocentesis is being applied for sex selection, and leads to abortion of girl babies. Ultrasound is used on pregnant mothers to provide an instant picture of the baby, inside and out. It brings into view internal organs like the heart, kidneys, and the brain. This pre birth inspection is now a routine part of what doctors call maternity management. It allows them to diagnose fetal disorders with greater precision, and diagnosis leads inevitably to the next step. Dr. Michael Harrison of the University of California Hospital.

Doctor: When we see newborn babies with obstructed urinary tracts, we say, we should be here earlier. But the only way to get there earlier if it's a newborn baby is to start thinking about doing it before birth.

DS: A new patient for medical treatment, the fetus, another boundary crossed. The impenetrable wound which has been tapped poked photographed is now open. Delicate surgery to correct certain congenital disorders is being performed to give the defective fetus a reasonable chance at a good start in life. This procedure is still experimental, using monkeys naturally, before we try it on ourselves. Until now, these kinds of operations have been performed on humans without removing the fetus from the womb.

DS: Fetal surgery may be the ultimate in preventative medicine, but it may create more problems than we can solve. The medical profession cannot agree which cases to treat and when. They may be salvaging fetuses who will only be born retarded, or severely handicapped. Fetal surgery opens up many medical and legal issues, which bring us to the ultimate question: Where does life begin? And how far do we go to control it?

DS: Even conception has been turned into a medical procedure. These Australian doctors are implanting an embryo into a woman's uterus. It looks like a ghost.

DS: Because of a blockage in her fallopian tubes. This woman's egg has been unable to complete its journey to the womb. Following a hormone treatment, the doctors harvested her eggs, then fertilized one with her husband's sperm. The moment of union took place in a test tube, the embryo was frozen to be implanted later. We have learned much about the reproductive process through experiments on cattle. As we apply those same techniques in our battle against human infertility, we find ourselves in a brave new world of baby making with a medical technician as key figure in reproduction. The biological link between parents and children can now be bypassed altogether. These practices, done for humane reasons, provide the technology for the complete control and manipulation of human reproduction.

DS: The human fetus, this is the target of medical science. Though not yet fully formed, this fetus is perfectly adapted and functioning for this stage of growth. Billions of cells exquisitely integrated into a single being.

DS: Any flaw in the smallest part can have enormous repercussions on the whole. Our technological solutions are often impressive, but science by its very nature tends to look at problems in isolation, and we are often left bewildered at the unanticipated consequences of our interference.

DS: This is a residential school for handicapped children. Many of these children are alive because of technology. They were born with spina bifida, a crippling deformation of the spine, often accompanied by a buildup of water on the brain. They might have died at birth, and had not been for the invention of a simple gadget. The shunt and mechanical valve to relieve the brain from water pressure saved the lives of a whole generation of spinal bifida babies, many of whom were to become severely handicapped. The Sheffield area in England was particularly affected by a large number of spinal bifida cases. Dr. John Lorber became a specialist in this field.

John Lorber: I like to use technology as my servant and not my master. And just because things can be done, doesn't mean to say that they either need be done or are in the ultimately beneficial This is what happened in the spinal bifida front for a number of years, the all the new technology that became available was for a time used by all surgeons physicians, not realizing their limitations. And whereas it produced a lot of happiness for a minority of the babies and families. It produced immense unhappiness and problems which didn't exist before.

DS: Mary and Michael Booth described the birth of their daughter born with Spina Bifida.

Mary Booth: Then when she was born, I asked immediately is she all right, and the nurse said no. 

Michael Booth: And the doctor sort of sort of sort of saying well that we're gonna have to have a baptized, she's not likely to survive. So then I went back to my wife to decide on the name which sort of was well thrust upon us. I mean, all this seemed to be happening all over rather quickly. We we chose the name where we had chosen the name Dulcie.

Mary Booth: No, Claudia, Claudia. I liked it and I didn't want to use it on a baby that was going to die. I felt it was a waste of the name I liked but at that stage I wasn't fit to think of another so it was Claudia Mary wasn't

Michael Booth: Sure, I choose the Mary i suppose.

DS: But Claudia did survive the first critical hour's faced with the prospect that this child would suffer, her parents agreed to an operation on her spine that's swelling that you should be learning now. She attends a school for handicapped children and goes home for holidays. She is paralyzed from the waist down.

Unknown Speaker: Number One Future. It looks as if we are now moving into the technical logical Future. Future. World, the world in which we live. World. Choice, the choice you have...

DS: Karen was a choice. By the time of her birth in the 1970s it was clear that indiscriminately saving all Spinal Bifida babies had been a mistake. Dr. Lorber introduced criteria for selecting which Spina Bifida newborns had the best prospects. The most severely handicapped were left untreated, and allowed to die.

DS: With less than half of the spine of visit a baby's surviving, medical resources were freed up. And babies with promised like Karen, were given every possible advantage.

Doctor: Some people say that doctors are playing God, when they use selective criteria for Spinal Bifida or anything else. But you could say that about any medical decision in any doctor, after all, is it not playing God more by interfering? What God created a terribly handicapped individual who is not able to live on its own, whose life is going to be terrible, isn't it playing God by interfering with it, and deliberately trying to make them live?

DS: Claudia's father,

Michael Booth: Under law was criteria, Claudia would not have survived birth. Now, of course, you have the problem. We love Claudia very much. And if she died at the moment, we'd obviously be be heartbroken. But if she'd sort of barely lived, and just sort of been an unhappy sort of accident a long time ago, perhaps, perhaps it would have been best. Because we weren't presented with that we were presented with a child who was not going to die immediately. And if we just left her would have probably sort of had a lot of years of suffering. So we felt that she was going to survive, I have to make the best of a bad job. That has been the name of the game ever since. Handicap child, a handicap family.

DS: Karen's parents.

Karen's Parents: Whether you decide that everything ought to be done to keep the baby alive or whether you decide that that's wrong. It's going to be an uncomfortable decision. You're going have moments of doubt as to whether you've done the right thing. And I think really in that situation, it's got to be your own decision. You can't imagine life without living can you know, that's That's right. They shouldn't be there. No.

DS: It's our capacity for love and compassion that moves us to save handicapped babies. The underlying assumption is that we can do better than nature. Yet if a simple interference as in the case of the shunt has such severe and unpredictable results, what will be the consequences in the explosive field of molecular genetics? 

DS: Like all of us, this child is the product of millions of years of evolution. Hidden in the 23 pairs of chromosomes on this chart is hereditary material that affects the color of her eyes, the shape of her nose, her possible height, perhaps even the time of her first steps.

DS: In the past two decades, we appear to have broken through the last barrier to controlling our own biological destiny. With the deciphering of the genetic code of DNA, we now have our hands on the levers of life. Our knowledge is in its infancy, yet we are already rushing to exploit it. We are manufacturing human genes, constructing new genes, we can identify errors in genes, and soon we will be able to correct them. But once we begin, where will it end? What if we decide to change the color of her eyes? What if society were to dictate the color of her skin? We are each entrenched in our own value systems that affect our judgment of what is a defect or a desirable trait. Only this time, we are playing with DNA, the molecule that specifies the very biological structures that make us human.

DS: So we reach further past the cells through the chromosomes into the very stuff of life, isn't it time we stopped to reflect?

DS: For over 3 billion years, these fragile threads of DNA have persisted as life on this planet changing over long periods of time, into an incredible variety of organisms. Now, through the eyes of science, they become an engineering project. Is it possible to achieve a more profound understanding of the limitations of scientific insight and appreciation of the vast complexity of life on this planet? Or must we always define progress in terms of control? 

DS: This machine manufactures DNA according to our specifications. We've penetrated to the very molecule of life and have it within our grasp, not only to engineer plants and animals, but our own children. Science's is great strength is also its terrible flaw. We know and control nature in bits and pieces. In studying a fragment of nature, we gain understanding and power over that one fragment. However, the consequences of our interventions extend far beyond the restricted view of the microscope and touch on the question of who we are our sense of self and placed in the social fabric. The potential effects of DNA manipulation in people put enormous power into the hands of specialists and our very evolutionary heritage at incredible risk.

DS: The most powerful reminders that we are still inextricably embedded in nature. Our The awesome events of birth and death. With all of our science, we can't begin to encompass the mystery of it all. But the bottom line is death, which seems to deny our ideas of uniqueness and superiority over all other life forms. In the past, religions helped to reconcile us with the fact of our death. But through the eyes of science, we see it as a biological process to be understood and controlled.

DS: Every culture deals with death in its own way. While some celebrate the joy of life, others mourn its passing.

DS: In the West, we fight with every tool at our disposal. Next week, at war with death.