Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 22, 1995 TAG: 9509220105
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BALTIMORE LENGTH: Medium
The conference, originally scheduled for 1992 but postponed after an uproar, also will examine possible screening for genetic markers to indicate criminal tendencies.
The three-day conference, organized by the University of Maryland, starts today at the private Aspen Institute in Queenstown, Md. Researchers in such fields as sociology, neuroscience, psychology and genetics, along with legal scholars and historians, will attend.
Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a Harvard professor of psychiatry and a black civil rights activist, said blacks should be leery.
``There's a history going way back to slavery of white Americans and Europeans saying that blacks are in some way inferior genetically,'' he said. ``There's such a strong chance of misuse that we have to be extremely cautious.''
Conference organizer David Wasserman, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland, said the research deals with the relationship between crime and genetics in individuals, not groups.
In 1992, the National Institutes of Health froze the $78,000 in funding it had promised for the conference, prompting cries of academic censorship from University of Maryland officials. Funding was restored last year after an NIH appeals board found the agency didn't have the power to freeze already approved funds.
About 35 participants at the conference will present papers and discuss whether tendencies toward violent or otherwise criminal behavior can be inherited and, if so, how this can be measured.
Dr. Evan S. Balaban, a geneticist and neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, cautioned against applying the research to public policy.
``I think the problem is, a lot of people on the fringes of science, in government and law, have this almost religious belief that things science produces are true and you must act on them,'' he said.
Not all of the research is controversial.
C. Ray Jeffery, a criminologist at Florida State University, will present a paper on possible medical approaches to preventing crime. Many inmates and juvenile delinquents suffer from neurological conditions, which if treated could prevent further crimes, he said.
by CNB