LEGACY OF GERMAN PSYCHIATRIC GENETICS - HINDSIGHT IS ALWAYS 20 20/

The history of psychiatric genetics is informed by this paper, which s erves to review the legacy of German psychiatric genetics and its ante cedents during the twentieth century, It also serves as an introductio n to two new annotated abstracts of basic research papers on family st udies of schizophrenia by Ernst Rudin in 1916 and by Bruno Schulz in 1 932, submitted by Kenneth Kendler and Edith Zerbin-Rudin, together wit h another paper by them describing the origin and activities of Rudin' s Munich School of Psychiatric Genetics (1917-1945), Our paper also in troduces an invited critical summary of the work of Ernst Rudin by his biographer Matthias RI, Weber, a medical historian working in the His torical Archives of the Clinical Institute of the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, We raise a number of bioethical questions in the context of the uses and misuses made of genetic information in th e service of the Nazi programs of eugenics, ''euthanasia,'' and genoci de. (C) 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.