The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 268 No 7200 p778
1 June 2002

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Father of eugenics [more]
Fingers in the pie [more]
The end of Ashur [more]

Father of eugenics

I was interested to see that a new book discussing the life of Sir Francis Galton, by Nicholas Wright Gillham, a geneticist of Duke University in the United States, has just been published. Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, is a somewhat controversial figure in the distinguished scientific company of the l9th century, not averse to sometimes fierce arguments with his fellows over social issues and attitudes, in which he tended to follow convention while overlaying them with highly unconventional religious tenets.

Galton was born in Birmingham in 1822 and studied medicine there and at King's College, London. He graduated in 1846 from Trinity College, Cambridge, but never became a medical practitioner. He developed a strong taste for travel, and in 1846 made his way up the Nile and explored the north African interior. Then, in 1850, he landed in Walfisch Bay and penetrated inland into the wild regions of South Africa. He also travelled in Europe and became a member of the Alpine Club. His interests were varied, and he was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1856.

In 1863 he wrote his 'Meteorographica', in which he described a system for weather forecasting. However, his main interest lay in the phenomena of heredity, and he wrote a series of books setting forth his findings and conclusions. Investigations into fingerprints produced three books, and between 1892 and 1895 he studied the inheritance of colour blindness and mental imagery patterns.

His belief that breeding from the best and most gifted individuals, and restricting the production of offspring by the less promising, would result in improvement of the human race and promote higher social conditions was embodied in the science (some say quasi-science) of eugenics, of which he is recognised as the great proponent. Galton studied the families of prominent people, and concluded that those eminent in their professions had more outstanding relatives than average people, and this was the basis of his belief. The trouble came when crazy dictators adopted the idea for producing a super-race, and eugenics came under a shadow from which it has never emerged.

Francis Galton was knighted in 1909. He died of acute bronchitis on 17 January 1911, in Haslemere in Surrey.

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Fingers in the pie

The use of fingerprints to identify individuals has a long history. When fingerprinting is used in judicial processes, however, there are arguments both for and against. Archaeologists claim that digital impressions made on clay tablets were used to identify their makers in ancient Assyria and Babylonia, and it is possible that Babylonian civil servants even took fingerprints when action was to be undertaken against suspected cheats over dues.

In Europe, Nehemiah Grew published observations on fingerprints in 1684 and Marcello Malpighi of Bologna in 1686. Classification for forensic purposes started in 1823, when Johannes Purkinje published a doctoral thesis in which he classified finger patterns into nine distinct groups. In the middle of that century Sir William Herschel, working for the British government in Bengal, took prints from Indian business associates to ensure legal transactions. A Scotsman working in Japan, Henry Faulds, interested in imprints on pottery, studied Far Eastern craftmakers for enthnological purposes. He stated in 1880 that by identifying fingerprints the perpetrator of a crime might be identified. Francis Galton, in 1892, published an analysis of arches, loops and whorls, still used in forensic investigations.

In recent years some doubts have arisen over the evidential value of fingerprints for securing legal convictions. In January of this year a United States district judge in Pennsylvania, Louis H. Pollack, ruled that fingerprint identification was subject to subjectivity and error in interpretation, and therefore did not meet the criteria for sound evidence. As reported in Science for 18 January, Pollack maintained that fingerprints might be admissible up to a point, but no claim that two prints constituted an accurate match might be entertained. Since then, the judge has reversed his decision, according to Science for 22 March, and agreed that print examiners might testify in a criminal trial, but that they could not state that prints taken at the scene of a crime matched those taken by the investigating authorities. Although the rate of error of the process of matching is not known, there is no evidence that it is unacceptably high.

There is an unfortunate implication that those individuals carrying out a fingerprint investigation are to be ranked as technicians and not as scientists, which throws some doubt on the weight to be placed on the quality of their evidence in a court of law. The dubious argument leaves fingerprinting with a shadow over it, but as a forensic scientist has remarked: "For all practical purposes, the 12 people on the jury couldn't care less." But the argument does illustrate once again that the criteria used by lawyers and those used by scientists differ markedly when it comes to determining what is the truth of a case.

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The end of Ashur

The site of Ashur, situated on a bluff overlooking the Tigris river, was associated with religion and culture in the ancient Assyrian empire and was a prominent trading centre during the third millennium BC. It then became the spiritual centre of Assyria, which by the ninth century BC stretched from Nubia to the Persian Gulf. The city was sacked in 612BC, and never recovered, although it remains to this day the epitome of Assyrian culture.

In Science for 22 March is an account of how the construction of the Tigris dam will flood dozens of important archaeological monuments by 2007. Iraqi archaeologists have asked for international help to try to salvage some of them, but fear that there will be too little time and too much political intrigue before the floods arrive to engulf the antiquities. Although the Makhool dam will alleviate a severe water shortage around Mosul and Baghdad, it will destroy 65 important sites that will need to be salvaged in the coming five years if they are not to be lost to posterity. A suggested coffer dam to protect Ashur has proved too expensive to be constructed by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and, in any case, would fail to protect the buried mud-brick structures of Ashur. Another ancient city upstream, Kar-Tukulti-Ninurta, which was the Assyrian capital in the 13th century BC, has never been properly investigated, and would be endangered by the waters.

Rescue operations are difficult, for several reasons. Archaeologists from the United States and Britain are barred from working in Iraq. Researchers from elsewhere in Europe and from Japan have only recently begun to return there after being driven out. And the Iraqi government is impoverished by sanctions and has no funds to spare.

According to the director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq: "Ashur is a site of world significance, and this affects the whole academic community." At a conference in London recently a statement was issued deploring the impending destruction of Ashur, but politicians in Europe and America, occupied with the contemplation of a military campaign against Saddam Hussein, are regrettably deaf to such pleas.

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