 I'm Christopher Donahue, NHGRI's historian. Hello, my name is Mali Sturda, I'm a professor at Oxford Brookes University in the UK. Marius and I are over the next 30 minutes, we'll discuss five of the most pervasive myths about eugenics, both now and in the 20th century. Our purpose here is to provide a general introduction to some of the most important issues and significant misunderstandings about surrounding eugenics and scientific racism. This presentation by the two of us is meant to enable you, our audiences, to become more aware of these complex and troubling histories. This means that not only will we be discussing more familiar topics like the history of genetics, biology and medicine, as well as statistics, but also broader cultural, intellectual and artistic developments in the 20th century. This is one of the main goals of this symposium, to impress upon you not only the present day persistence of eugenics and scientific racism, but to underscore how deeply eugenics and scientific racism were part of the history of the 20th century. After our presentation, you will hear four more brilliant talks and two further question and answer sessions today, which will seek to not only address the meaning of eugenics, but also its key genealogies in the ideas and the practices of racism, ableism, colonialism and slavery. As importantly, these lectures will also give you key insights into the ways that historians study these difficult topics, using archival evidence as well as social scientific research methods to not only better understand and communicate these injustices, but to ensure that the stories of survivors of eugenics and of scientific racism are told. Marius will now give a concise definition of eugenics, outline the five myths and detail the first three myths. Marius, go ahead. Thank you very much indeed, Chris. It's a great pleasure to share this panel with you. I'll get straight to it. The English polymath Francis Galton was the founder of modern eugenics. Galton made significant contributions to statistics, anthropology, psychology, forensics and meteorology, the study of weather. He also coined the phrase nature and nurture. Galton defined eugenics as the study of agencies under social control they may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally. End of quote. Charles Davenport, arguably the most important American eugenicist, offered a simpler, but no less effective definition. Eugenics, according to Davenport, was the science of improvement of the human race by better predict. Eugenics relied on speculations about social norms, cultural, ethnic, gender differences and racial worth. Ideas of social and economic productivity also flowed readily from eugenic arguments. Eugenicists argued that if an individual was found to be socially unfit, it was appropriate for them to be weeded out. Feed was a eugenic label for those members of society who are them pathological, criminal, asocial and undesired. Eugenicists wanted to prevent these people from having children. The controlled humanity they claimed was to ensure the betterment of future generations and the survival of the species. None of these claims was substantiated by credible scientific evidence. But the lack of proven scientific arguments did not prevent the general and the specialized public from adopting a eugenic worldview. We should not treat eugenics eugenics as a historical anomaly. Eugenics was not a deviation from the western scientific norm that found its practical application only in Nazi policies of genocide. Eugenics was an integral aspect of our global modernity, one in which the state and the individual alike embarked on an unprecedented quest to create an idealized future offered by the promises of evolutionary biology and genetics. Eugenics went through various iterations over the course of the 20th century and it has given rise to several myths. Our talk today aimed to debunk merely five of them and to outline some key feature of not just the history of eugenics but of its legacies as well. Let me introduce the first myth to you. Charles Darwin and Greg O. Mendel came up with eugenics. The scientific legacies of Charles Darwin and Greg O. Mendel, namely Darwinism and Mendelian genetics, though relevant are just two of the many roots of eugenics. Perhaps more important, at least during the late 19th century, was the fear of degeneration and decline. The white intellectual and scientific elites around the globe viewed industrialization, the increasing mobility of peoples and secularization with varying degrees of fear. They sought to develop a science which could counteract these and other aspects of modernity. But that science was not the same as Darwin's theory of national selection. Nor was it based, at least at first, on Mendel's principle of inheritance. Francis Galton was the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. That is true, but they did not share the same views on heredity. Galton's theory of eugenics was a combination of racism, classism, ableism, sexism, and colonialism. But he also relied on the emerging disciplines of anthropology, sociology, social statistics, and crucially psychology. Equally important, Galton was not aware of Mendel's experiments in plant hybridization when publishing his theory of eugenics. But the contributions of genetics and geneticists to the history of eugenics cannot be underestimated. Mendel's theory of inheritance was used by the eugenicists worldwide after 1900s to promote what can be called social mentalism. This is to say, genetic principles were applied to explain the heredity of criminality, pauperism, alcoholism, feeble-mindedness, and other forms of antisocial behavior. In turn, many prominent geneticists embraced eugenics. Ronald Fisher is one of them. He contributed significantly to the development of population genetics, and without him, contemporary genomics would be a very different science. Yet, Fisher relied on Mendelian genetics to justify eugenic practices such as sterilization. Therefore, although the arguments upon which eugenics was based were scientifically and morally unsound, communities of scientists, not just geneticists but also religious figures, social reformers, and politicians employed the term, consistently endowing it with meaning and credibility. It bear emphasis, however, that while geneticists often provided some of the justification for sterilization and for eugenics, their sterilizations themselves were carried out not by them but by doctors or social workers. As I mentioned sterilization, let us now move swiftly to the second myth. Eugenics and compulsory sterilization were restricted to Nazi Germany and hence ceased in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Nazi racial state mobilized all possible resources to eliminate its racial enemies, including ethnic minorities such as the Jews, the Sinti and Roma, as well as individuals due to perceived mental and physical disabilities for their sexual orientation. Until 1945, around 400,000 people belonging to these groups were forcefully sterilized in Nazi Germany and other territories it occupied. Thousands died of medical complications resulting from the procedure. Another 70,000 adults and the least 5,000 children with disabilities were murdered during the T4 euthanasia program. Nazi Germany's determination to eugenically purify the race and society of its undesired members astonishes us to this day with its combination of sheer brutality, careful planning, and public support. But to assume that eugenics and its accompanying racist practices ended with a defeat of Nazism is another myth. Individuals in the United States who are labeled unfit, feeble-minded and defective alongside men and women of color continue to be sterilized in public institutions such as hospitals and prisons until the 1970s and in some cases beyond California was the state with the highest number of sterilizations with around 20,000 operations performed between 1909 and 1979. After World War II, prominent biologists agreed with the need to intervene in the social development of an individual to locate and diagnose the adverse or positive effects of their heredity. None other than Theodosius Dobrzanski, one of the architects of the modern synthesis suggested that since many genetic defects were too costly to correct, sterilization was advisable. As he noted in his 1960 Mankind Evolving, the evolution of the human species, persons known to carry serious hereditary defects, he said, or to be educated to realize the significance of this fact if they are likely to be persuaded to refrain from reproducing their kind or if they're not mentally competent to reach a decision, their segregation or sterilization is justified. We need not accept a brave new world to introduce this much of eugenics and of God. Eugenics also fed into welfare systems in countries such as Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Czechoslovakia, which continued with their sterilization programs after World War II. The creators of welfare, healthcare and social assistance programs in these countries lamented the difficulty of fixing the outcomes of successive generations of unfortunate mating choices through education and environmental improvement. Instead, they continued to look to eugenics solutions such as sterilization. Having mentioned sterilization in these European countries serves as a good introduction to the presentation of the next myth, liberal democracies in not endorse eugenics. Another powerful myth is that eugenics only thrived in totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany, where eugenics spread successfully across the political spectrum, both the right and the left, for their own different reasons, sought to eliminate unfit and protect fit individuals. Many eugenicists on both sides of the political spectrum pursued projects. They fused ideas of heredity and cultural determinism with modern visions of a new society, a new man, a new woman, a new nation. Eugenics drew its energies from and in turn it reinforced political beliefs and idealized histories inhabiting all national countries. Even a curfewy look at any modern state in the 20th century reveals how popular eugenics were with every ideology and every form of government. By the 1920s, eugenics organizations existed in most countries in the world and international congresses were organized where eugenics could meet and share their ideas. In the United States, a country proud of its democratic tradition, Yale economist and first president of the American Eugenics Society, Irving Fisher, called eugenics incomparably the most important concern of the human race. And to mention another example, think of President Theodore Roosevelt's obsession with race suicide and the uplifting of white masculinity as the epitome of racial renewal. His attempts to prevent the decline of Americans white Anglo-Saxon and Nordic populations centered often on the legaries of race and blood and equally on negative eugenic messages such as stylization. In unison with the major figures of the American eugenic movement, Roosevelt believes that biological engineering and selective breeding were necessary for the improvement of individuals and societies. Not surprisingly perhaps white American families were deemed eugenically valuable to the future of the country. It is therefore fair to say that eugenics intersected the entire gamut of political beliefs inhabiting American political conscience. It may come as a surprise to many of us, but for decades eugenics was as popular in the United States as church going. I'll leave it to Chris to discuss the involvement of religion with eugenics. Thank you, Maurice. Myth number four, Christian religion was incompatible with eugenics. Following the issuing of the papal and cyclical Casticonubi in 1930, Catholic theologians typically condemned sterilization except as a punishment for criminal behavior, but support for other eugenic strategies has always been constant. In his pamphlet Christian Marriage published in 1948, the moral theologian Father Egger Schmidler noted, and here I quote, segregation of certain degenerates or their detention in colonies of institutions also meets with the church's approval. This should benefit society both by separating degenerates from it and by eliminating their potential degenerate offspring. End quote. Writing in 1965, Father Bernard Haring was equally blunt. And here I quote again, Haring notes the church favors the aspirations of scientific eugenics. End quote. Haring is widely considered to be among the most important and influential theologians of the 20th century, and one of the most prominent theologians to descend from the church's positions on contraception as outlined in the papal and cyclical Himenevite published in 1968. The Protestant theologian and bioethicist Paul Ramsey noted in his 1970 book fabricated man, the ethics of genetic genetic control that quote, contemporary geneticists were increasingly being driven to varying degrees of bloom regarding the future of mankind because of the inexorable degeneration of the human gene genetic pool under the conditions of modern life. End quote. Another prominent Protestant bioethicist Joseph Fletcher concluded in his 1988 ethics of genetic control. And here I quote from Fletcher, the accusation that the new biology is trying to create a master race is fair enough if it means that a people with fewer defects and more control over the crippling accidents of nature are better able to master life's ups and downs. Most of us would want to belong to the master race in that sense. Mastery in the sense of good health and inheritance is sanity, Fletcher wrote. Now, it is important to note that some religious leaders highlighted the primacy of heredity in shaping character and behavior while others insisted equally on the role of education and environment. Not surprisingly, they also disagreed over which eugenic measures were deemed practical and efficient and which should be rejected on ethical, scientific, and religious grounds. When applied to society, eugenics sometimes operated outside the field of science, notwithstanding the credibility bestowed upon it by many scientists. Intellectually, it must be pointed out, eugenics often yielded no consensus. Scientifically, its basis in genetics was often exceptionally insecure and morally, it provoked strong opposition from both religious and humanitarian figures. But to assume that Catholicism and Protestantism outrightly and unequivocably rejected eugenics is a myth. Now I will proceed to the last myth. Myth number five. If we understand and avoid the mistakes of the past, we can have a scientific eugenics in the future. Eugenicists from Greek philosophers such as Plato to contemporary politicians and policymakers who advocate the sterilization of Muslim Uighurs are driven by the false belief that society is threatened by the unfit, the criminal, the antisocial, and by those with disabilities and LGBTQIA individuals. Eugenicists also wrongly believe that human destiny and social futures are determined by heredity. Likewise, many geneticists in the 1960s and 70s saw interwar eugenics as ideologically driven and unscientific. As Kurt Stern, the pioneering human geneticist who also has a significant award in human genetics named after him, remarked in his monumental Principles of Human Genetics, and here I quote, he says, much of eugenic thinking in the past was based on inadequate knowledge and prejudice and has been harmful. Nevertheless, the development of a generation of molecular techniques since the Second World War had finally provided a scientific foundation for eugenics. With increasing insight, Stern believed, and here I quote, wise planning will be possible in the future. Then eugenic and genetic counseling will become the foundation of man's direction of his own biological evolution, unquote. Very similar were the views of Robert Cook. Cook was a geneticist and demographer who was for four decades the editor of the Journal of Heredity. He was the former head of the Population Reference Bureau, which he ran for nearly a decade from 1959 to 1968. The Population Reference Bureau was founded by Guy Irving Birch, a raciously committed eugenicist and racist who ran the organization prior to Cook. Now, it still exists to this day and continues to be cited by various media outlets such as National Public Radio as an authority on population studies and demography. Robert Cook most significantly was a consultant to the federal government and to the National Institutes of Health on population policy and reproductive studies during the 1960s. He was an expert as well for a Senate hearing on the population crisis in June of 1965. Cook spent a great deal of time in the post-war period thinking about how to rebrand eugenics as something more palatable to the wider public, something that could be made more scientific than interwar eugenics. And in a draft of a 1971 article entitled Born Equal but Different, he wrote that, quote, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, end quote, were not possible with the existence of hereditary defects such as hemophilia. He underscored that such quote unquote hereditary defects caused a, and here I quote from Cook, an enormous miasma of suffering, frustration, and despair, end quote. He noted that because of medical advances, individuals with hereditary defects were living longer. Cook was clear in his application that, quote, the enjoyment of these benefits carries with it the responsibility to not to have children who will transmit these afflictions to future generations, end quote. And in another article published in 1917 entitled Genocide and Heredity, Cook expounded on his belief that individuals must be counseled to, quote, forego reproduction, end quote, which is a, as he puts it, touching form of self-immolation, which serves the future compassionately by reducing the frequency of these heart-rending defects in succeeding generations, as Cook wrote. Cook goes on to say that sickle cell trait and sickle cell, say in the case of sickle cell trait and sickle cell anemia, that quote, unless the reproduction of trait individuals can be reduced, the primary objective of eugenics remains an illusion, end of quote from Cook. Thus, the idea that eugenics will ever become scientific is a danger, a catastrophically dangerous illusion. A gene or more recently sequenced variants for criminal behavior does not exist. Higher social mobility relative to a particular group is not genetically determined. There has never been a gay gene. Genes are not our destiny and the central premise and premise of eugenics, the perfect ability of the social group, the so-called race, the nation, or the species, and the society through the control of heredity is a myth. So now, Marius, back to you for some concluding thoughts. Thank you, Chris. Thank you very much indeed. Regrettably, I think, and I hope you would all agree, eugenics continues to shape our lives, whether it is fossilization based on ethnicity, gender or criminal record, immigration restrictions, and various methods for pursuing prenatal genetic testing for disabilities. It is therefore imperative to understand the implications of eugenic thinking in practice for the world today. I think we need to begin by publicly acknowledging how difficult it is to come to terms with our eugenic past. Healing the deep wounds caused by more than a century of eugenics required public recognition of those wronged in the past and of those who continue to be mistreated in the present. It is a slow process, to be sure. A progress is being made. Victims of sterilization across the world are finally being recognized, heard, and awarded reparations, whether we're talking about the United States or Japan or recently the Czech Republic amongst other countries. In 2017, for instance, indigenous women in Canada failed the class action lawsuit seeking to hold the Canadian government amongst other parties responsible for coerce or otherwise involuntary sterilization. In Peru, a reckoning may finally occur over the Fujimori's government sterilization program. So as importantly, as the things we discussed in this panel, the human genetics community has begun speaking up about the legacies of racism, white supremacy, and eugenics and its close connections to the history of genetics and evolutionary biology. Finally, major institutions in the United Kingdom and the United States are now addressing and confronting the eugenic past and building the foundation for an anti-eugenic future. For more than a century now, as we've heard, eugenics has depended on the myth that its methods were scientifically and morally sound and its goals demonstrably achievable. We continue to challenge this myth with projects such as the anti-eugenics projects and confront eugenics and many others. Ultimately though, this collective effort to combat eugenics, to fight it rests, not with just the individuals involved but also with major institutions of research which must reject racism, genetic, exceptionalism, and biological determinism, along with the idea that humanity can be purposefully perfected. These are among the core tenets of an anti-eugenic reckoning which starts and ends with every individual making the choice to reject eugenics and its false promises of human improvement. Thank you very much indeed. And we hope that with this lecture and with the lectures over the next two days that our audiences will have the framework to have meaningful discussions of these complex histories and that this will be one in a series of impactful, engaging, and meaningful discussions about eugenics and scientific racism at the NIH and beyond over the next few years. So thank you very much. And we do look forward to having your questions and comments throughout the day. Thank you. Thank you.