Violence, genes, and prejudice - Cover Story

AS SCIENTIFIC DEBATES GO, the war of words over the genetic roots of violence has itself been marked by unusual violence. It has damaged careers, provoked comparisons with Nazi pogroms, and prompted bitter talk of science being corrupted by political correctness. It has also sparked passionate statements about racists, Luddites, and monkey sex. This is the stuff of great fiction.

But it's true. And the arguments are only likely to get fiercer as violence in America continues to rise.

Let's leave aside for the moment the question of whether a convincing connection can yet be made between certain genes and violent behavior. Even without conclusive evidence that it can, heated questions are being raised. Will the government try to screen people to see if they have genes that incline them to violence? If people do have such a gene, can they be forced into medical therapy? What if tests are used selectively to screen minority children, on the grounds that a growing number of American prison inmates are black or Hispanic? "Research into genetic factors has tremendous impact, and it is likely to yield controversial findings that are highly susceptible to abuse and misunderstanding," says David Wasserman, who teaches philosophy of law, medicine, and social science at the University of Maryland's Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy.

Wasserman knows what he is talking about; he has already been burned by the debate. A 1992 conference he planned on "genetic factors in crime" had its federal funding yanked after it was denounced for fostering racial prejudice and promoting a "modern-day version of eugenics." Research presented at the conference, its more vehement opponents protested to the New York Times, "would inevitably target minority children in the inner city in the guise of preventing future crime."

Wasserman adamantly denies those charges. "Scientists were brought to this subject by legitimate curiosity," he says. "They did not wake up one day having been mugged and say, 'Let's see if there is a gene responsible for crime." Scientists see themselves as increasing understanding of human behavior--though they may be naive about the implications of their research and the political agendas it might further."

IRONICALLY, CURRENT EFFORTS to assess what role biology and genetics might play in violent human behavior started out with the best of intentions, at least from the point of view of the people behind them.

One of those people was Louis Sullivan, the Bush administration's secretary of health and human services from 1989 to 1993. Sullivan was appalled by the epidemic of violence he saw taking place in American cities. In 1992 more than 26,000 Americans were murdered, and 6 million violent crimes were committed, with young men and minorities falling victim most frequently. One in every 27 black men, compared with one in 205 white men, died violently; one in 117 black women met the same fate, as compared with one in 496 white women. And a disproportionate amount of the violence to blacks was being done by blacks, in poor, underserved urban neighborhoods. Black Americans, who constitute about 12 percent of the population, were arrested for 45 percent of the nation's violent crimes.

Sullivan, a black physician who is now president of Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, wanted to try addressing violence as a public health issue. "The rationale for this was the high incidence of violence and homicide in young black people and particularly young black males," he explained last July in the first interview he has given on the controversy since leaving office. "The hope was that we could diagnose the likelihood of violence occurring and learn how we might intervene, in terms of counseling families and individuals."

To that end, Sullivan began organizing his department's research resources under the banner of the "Violence Initiative." "At the time we got into this," he says, "the predominant thought was to look at unemployment, poverty, use of illicit drugs--a whole range of factors that might contribute to the likelihood of violence. I wanted to bring together the various components that could help us address the question of violent behavior, primarily from the psychological and sociological point of view." Some of this research had biological aspects, of course, including studies that looked at people's brain chemistry and even their genes. But these studies, largely done at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), formed only a fraction of the initiative, accounting for .5 percent of its budget. They were hardly uppermost in Sullivan's mind--he saw the overriding problems as social--yet it was precisely these studies that came to haunt him.

Among them were some exploring the link between aggressive behavior and disturbances in levels of a chemical called serotonin. Gerald L. Brown, a psychiatrist who is clinical director of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, explains that serotonin transmits nerve signals in the brain and is important in regulating sleep, sexual behavior, appetite, and impulsivity. In 1979 Brown was part of the team that first suggested an association between low levels of serotonin and out-of-control aggressive behavior in a group of U.S. military men. Serotonin depletion appears to have a disinhibiting effect, says Brown, and studies have repeatedly implicated it in explosive, destructive, impulsive behavior, including suicide. "A more familiar word might be violent," he adds, "but violent is not a scientific term; it's descriptive."