The seduction of science to perfect an imperfect race.

The author reflects on the lessons of the Holocaust Memorial Museum's exhibition "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." The exhibition is about problems universal to science and medicine. Eugenics was not a crazed Hitlerian fantasy, and eugenicists were within the scientific mainstream. To the extent that American science pursues an openness and transparency that was absent from Nazi science, it may insulate itself from ethical dangers. But "Deadly Medicine" diagnoses patterns of thought that persist in science and social thinking. The exhibition reminds us that when faced with fears and anxieties similar to those that led to Auschwitz, we have scientific, historical, legal, and social precedents that can turn us toward an ethical confusion and uncertainty that is healthier than the certainty with which Nazi science proceeded down its grisly road.