Edwin Black, author of IBM and the Holocaust and War Against the Weak, published some material adapted from the latter book last year in the San Francisco Chronicle: Eugenics and the Nazis - the California connection 11/09/03.
Eugenics was the study of ways to use genetics to improve the health and well-being of human beings. It justifiably has a bad reputation now, although some of the promoters of it were working from genuinely scientific and humanitarian concerns. But the movement in the US was heavily influenced by the anti-immigration sentiments of the 1920s and well as unscientific ideas about race. One of its more notorious accomplishments was to popularized the practice of compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded. The late Stephen Jay Gould in The Mismeasure of Man (rev. 1996) described some of the racial assumptions of the late 19th century, flawed even by the scientific standards of the time, which provided much of the intellectual background for eugenics.
Black's article talks about some of the ways in which eugenics research in America, sponsored by prestigious institutions and donors like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Instituion and the Harriman railway fortune, wound up influencing the Nazi pseudo-science of race in Germany.
Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations -- which functioned as part of a closely-knit network -- published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis. ...
The eugenics movement is a reminder that science can be influenced by the political and social goals and preconceptions of its practitioners. Genetics research in itself is not evil. But good science needs to be applied and moral and ethical judgments as well as realistic laws are necessary to prevent abuses.
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