Is Putins Fascination With Genetics Just Eugenics In Disguise?

(The Daily Beast) Russian President Vladimir Putins domestic propaganda campaign has been telling people to hunker down that they need to find ways to wall off the country from the West. They need to protect their internet by cutting it off from the global web the Kremlin suggests otherwise Russias enemies might exploit social media to undermine the state. (The irony of such proclamations will not be lost on American readers.) And now Putin is talking about a really ominous sounding threatto the very DNA of the Russian people. The new buzzword among Russian authorities is biodefense" which at its most benign may mean taking a lead in the highly lucrative development of genetic editing techniques to cure diseases grow better crops and the like. But at its most sinister it takes on the coloration of eugenics the discredited science" of the 19th and early 20th centuries that promised to create superior humans based on racial and ethnic stereotypes.