Eugenics Movement in America

When Athenian philosopher Plato wrote that an optimized society could be had by encouraging high-class people to mate while discouraging procreation among the lower classes, he became the first thinker in human history to propose a system of forced genetic selection.

What is Eugenics?

Eugenics is the systematic selection and cleansing of the human gene pool through any means necessary, including forced sterilization and euthanasia, but is entirely subjective and racially biased. The term “Eugenics” was coined by the British polymath and cousin to Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton in his 1869 publication of Hereditary Genius, where he also coined the phrase “nature vs. nurture.”

The American Eugenics Movement

While Galton’s genetic selection plans never took hold in his native country, Americans widely embraced the Eugenics Movement, beginning in 1896, when Connecticut made it illegal for feeble-minded people or epileptics to marry.

While the American Breeder’s Association was founded in 1903 to study eugenics, cereal maker John Harvey Kellogg created the Race Betterment Foundation in 1911, which established a “pedigree registry,” and would later lead scientists and socialists to found the Eugenics Record Office, with the objective of identifying bad genetic traits closely associated with ethnicity, economics and other social views of the day.

The Eugenics Movement in the U.S. crossed into the dark side when California began sterilizing some 20,000 mentally ill patients from 1909 to 1979, under the misguided hope of ending mental illness. 38 states would eventually allow forced sterilizations on victims whom lawmakers deemed genetically unworthy of procreation, while in 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that involuntary sterilization of a handicapped person failed to violate the U.S. Constitution, prompting Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes to declare that “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The ruling would be overturned in 1942, but not before thousands of people were sterilized for the betterment of the human gene pool. Even more appalling, a 1976 Government Accountability Office report revealed that some 25 to 50 percent of Native Americans were sterilized between 1970 and 1976, largely without consent and generally performed during other surgical procedures such as an appendectomy.

Germline Gene Editing

After Drs. Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Carpentier and others discovered the gene-editing technic known as CRISPR-Cas9, scientists and medical ethicists must now grapple with a new form of eugenics, which could eventually see CRISPR used by parents intent on designing perfect offspring, both from a physical appearance standpoint, as well as genetically-engineered resistance to hereditary diseases.

Known as Germline genome editing—a process that permanently changes a human’s inheritable DNA, CRSPR may one day see a resurgence in the Eugenics Movement, altering the human genome in ways both useful yet potentially wrong.